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Google Universal Analytics is gone. Where should you go now?

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Well, it finally happened. In a mild surprise to the industry, Google actually stuck to the announced sunset date for Universal Analytics. While there are some reports of GA still collecting data (I would love to link to the Tweet here and throughout the post, if linking to Twitter still worked) it seems clear that it is actually in the process of being turned off. Some folk desperately hoped for a last-minute deadline extension to give GA4 some more time to mature, further demonstrating how much Google overestimates the maturity of their own tool.

Luckily, Google isn’t the only player on the market. My new job at Accutics gives me the chance to speak to many tool vendors at quite a bunch of conferences and conventions. In addition to my own continuous market monitoring, talking to the teams and developers of those tools gave me some deeper insight into how vendors position their solutions and what their target ICPs are.

In this post, I want to share what I’ve learned about the tools (besides Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics) and – most importantly – give some concrete recommendations for alternatives to Google Analytics. Different from other posts and comparisons, I will not even pretend to be neutral and won’t end with a “it depends, do your own research”-type of statement. Instead, I will examine the different maturity stages of a company venturing into digital analytics and recommend one tool per stage. In the end, I will give you a list of other tools that I’ve examined but can’t recommend just yet. Hope you find some value in this!

Recommended Solutions

Cutting straight to the most important part, I will give you three tool recommendations to companies at different “maturity stages”. Before I get to the recommendation, I will shortly describe how a company at the respective stage could look like and what sets them apart. Starting with the earliest stage, let me introduce the…

The “we just discovered the internet, is anyone using our site?” Stage

Description: At this stage, we find many older or smaller companies which just decided that they should look into this “internet” thing. In such companies, we usually don’t find a dedicated digital team but a go-to person who runs the whole website. Editing the page is usually very manual and infrequent, as the website only details company information and high-level product categories. The website itself is typically hosted on a small on-premise server or uses a cheap website builder. There is little interest in any website performance numbers beyond technical monitoring and the CEO asking “what about that website?” once a year.

Recommendation: Use a tool like AWStats with existing web server logfiles. Companies at this early stage should typically not invest into any frontend-integrated analytics tool. The added effort and legal implications to implement and maintain a larger solution will not be paying off soon, considering the limited interest in the website and its data. Administrators of websites are usually running a tool like AWStats (or a hoster-specific tool) already to monitor technical load, which opens the opportunity to re-purpose it for some light website analysis. Our industry is very quick to disregard those simpler tools, while I believe that they can bring some great insights to companies discovering digital channels. Once digital as a channel becomes more important, a company might enter the…

The “let’s push some people to our site!” Stage

Description: At this second stage, companies will have run their website for quite some time and start seeing the value in it. The content of the site shifts to a more detailed, product- and sales-oriented style. Beyond the single person maintaining a site, there are more and more people requesting content and expressing interest in website performance. To help with the demand, the companies might hire their very first digital marketer to build marketing capabilities and drive traffic to the page. In addition to high-level numbers, the companies now need more detailed insights and a way to integrate marketing pixels to optimize campaigns and integrate tools.

Recommendation: Use Piwik PRO in the cloud. While quite a bunch of tools position themselves as competitors to the free version of Google Analytics, Piwik PRO has the most compelling feature set and overall offering. It comes with an analytics frontend that feels very familiar to GA but has even more OOTB reports readily accessible. And it doesn’t stop there! Highly relevant to companies at this stage, it also brings a tag management and consent management solution, making it possible to run campaigns while complying with regulations. If all of that sounds too painless: It even offers a self-hosted version for companies striving to live in agony. There is a free “core” plan as well as a paid “enterprise” plan, allowing companies to grow into a mature practice without spending a fortune and having to hire a full analytics team. Once that time has come though, a company might enter the…

The “mature digital company” Stage

Description: At this third and last stage, the company has successfully built a digital practice, hired more digital marketers, and maybe even their first digital analyst. The website receives considerable traffic and features interactive elements like live chat. Marketing campaigns run across multiple platforms and are orchestrated through a tag management solution (like Piwik Pro). More and more employees have stakes in the website’s performance and want access to data. To help with that demand, the company is venturing into a self-served approach as more and more marketing or product managers want to take better decisions.

Recommendation: Use Adobe Customer Journey Analytics. You won’t be surprised that this is my recommendation for any company that reached a certain maturity stage. Just like its predecessor Adobe Analytics, Customer Journey Analytics is the only solution on the market that allows your whole company to center around data-informed decision-making. While it brings more features than other tools, Adobe made the game-changing decision to offer a single user interface (called Analysis Workspace) that works for every type of user, be it a novice business stakeholder or a senior digital analyst or even data scientist. There’s no need to learn SQL or use multiple tools to answer even the most complex questions about content, product, or marketing, allowing companies to truly collaborate around data. As digital becomes more and more important to companies at this stage, CJA will be the perfect tool to take them on the journey towards a mature practice. As a rule of thumb: If a company is ready to spend money on an analytics solution, they should be spending it on Adobe.

Not recommended tools

Now, let’s take a look at the even longer list of tools (or categories of tools) that I examined but can’t quite recommend, of course starting with…

Google Analytics 4

Much has already been said about GA4 by many people who worked extensively with its previous version. Besides Google themselves, nobody seems to be happy with it or even consider it ready yet. It lacks a lot of previously available features and even loses some over time, like the previously available attribution models beyond Google’s “trust me, bro” model. There’s a lot of black-box guesswork required to use it, making it pretty clear what Google’s plan is: Remove all of GA’s feature so everyone starts using Big Query with a visualization tool, which they can, of course, monetize. With that plan, they can get rid of everything GA does besides connecting to Google Ads, as everyone can “just build it themselves” in Big Query, fundamentally (and maybe even intentionally) misunderstanding what companies actually need: accessible data analysis. Their recent retirement of other offerings, like Google Domains, shows that Google is simply not a company to do business with anymore.

Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap, and other “product analytics” tools

There’s been a recent trend of analytics tools self-labeling as “product analytics”, trying to invent a niche in digital analytics that they claim has not been covered by other tools. While there is very little substance to those claims and many features are just commonly available, they have some interesting features and user interfaces to offer. However, there is very little coherence in their UX, making them quite convoluted. For example, Amplitude brings some neat features but has users running in circles, trying to find the right menu for the visualization or report they are looking for. Its fixation on delivering new features seems to get in the way of offering an accessible UI and clear workflows, especially when compared to Adobe as both the market leader and most feature-rich solution.

Matomo and other “believe us, we’re just like Google!” tools

Just like some vendors try to differentiate themselves from the market-dominating tools, some try and find an audience by appearing very similar to GA. There’s a bunch of those tools on the market, with Matomo being one of them. Originally named “Piwik”, the tool renamed itself to “Matomo” (which I believe are the Japanese words “Ma” and “Tomo” for “bad” and “branding”, but I might be remembering incorrectly) some years ago. While it lacks many features, its backend is neither scaleable nor modern, making it awfully slow for any larger traffic volumes. While the open source aspect might be tempting for some, it’s better to just go with Piwik Pro.

Fathom, Plausible, and other “Privacy friendly” or “cookieless” tools

With companies becoming more aware of the importance of data regulations, there has been a rush to quickly build “compliant” alternatives to Google Analytics, accelerating even more with UA’s sunset. However, once you start looking into how those small tools are built, their claims fall apart rapidly. The feature level is not even comparable to Google Analytics (let alone Adobe) and many of them are running on Amazon Web Services, making them easy to build and run but giving your user’s data to a US-controlled company, jeopardizing the advertised compliance. Some even claim that they don’t require consent to track data, which is shoddy advice at best. To add insult to injury, log analysis tools (like the mentioned AWStats) offer the same functionality while actually being more privacy friendly, admittedly with a less modern UI.

The modern data pile

I’ve gone on record in the past expressing my concerns with what is commonly called the “modern data stack”. Many companies are still falling for the promises of the “collect all data now, generate value later” paradigm, urging them to build data collection pipelines, data lakehouses, and visualization tools themselves. While it might be tempting to give the analytics team a practically unlimited budget for tools and processes, the added complexity will ultimately slow the business down significantly, creating a culture of avoiding analysis to speed up decision making. I’ve personally never seen any case where it wouldn’t have been quicker, easier, and cheaper to just use Adobe’s CJA instead of a pile of open source tools, even with the gigantic teams behind them.

Piano Analytics

Piano deserves its very own mention on this list. It is a quite impressive platform with a whole bunch of interfaces. The reporting interface is ahead of what Google offers and the level of sophistication has positively surprised me. But just like the mentioned “product analytics” tools, the number of interfaces makes it a bit too convoluted for my liking. It’s not as confusing as some of the other tools on this list but still can’t keep up with Adobe’s market leading Analysis Workspace. I would have loved to recommend it over Piwik PRO, but the more focused approach and overall package made Piwik PRO end up ahead.

Conclusion

Universal Analytics’ sunset has undoubtedly been a kick in the teeth for Google’s customers. While it is now clear that Google is not a trustworthy business partner, the attention they bring to other solutions holds some good opportunity to evaluate needs and migrate to a more reliable and feature-rich alternative.

I hope that my view was able to add something to the discussion around GA alternatives. I’m quite interested in your opinion on my concepts here, be it the maturity stages or classification of alternatives. Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions, as it is impossible for any single person to cover all aspects and all available tools. Enjoy your day in this UA-free world!

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