One thing to note is that many Google Analytics alternatives suffer from data accuracy issues.
They record and count analytics data differently from how Google Analytics does.
Therefore, before fully transitioning to Google Analytics and being surprised by a drop in visitors, it's advisable to use any analytics alternative alongside it first.
> One thing to note is that many Google Analytics alternatives suffer from data accuracy issues.
They record and count analytics data differently from how Google Analytics does.
During my years of experience using Google Analytics, I had very limited faith in Google Analytics accuracy. For example, bots routinely poisoned the referrer logs.
So holding them as a benchmark of accuracy seems off the mark for me.
I have the strong suspicion, that nobody has really great bot detection to this day.
Even with Google Analytics, I mostly used the data for rough trend analysis over longer periods, rather than react to every little 5% blip in the data.
For example, it was useful for observing the shift to mobile at differing pace for different types of websites. And that allowed for prioritizing website redesign projects during the 2010s.
And I’m also pretty puzzled at the criticism in your article of Matomo for being too close to how to Google Analytics works, while simultaneously holding Google Analytics as the gold standard to be compared against. That seems rather inconsistent to me.
I have reviewed many Google Analytics replacements in terms of features and capabilities. Matomo may be suitable for you, but its data presentation is not user-friendly. If you only need basic metrics to track, there are many alternatives that present analytics data more clearly. For more information, see https://algustionesa.com/google-analytics-alternatives/.
