Has anyone tried GA alternatives?

[Theo23]

Hi there, I've passed the worst months of my life trying to switch all my websites (more than 20) to GA4, given that UA was shutting down. However, I still don't feel comfortable with the interface, and the metrics I'm getting seem to be not that precise. In general I tend to spend a lot more time on the interface than the time I spent on GA3 on average because It's not easy anymore to get where I want.

So, I searched all the web for something that was like GA3 since I used it for more than 8 years... I stomped into publytics.
I'm at my 10th day of free trial and I think I'm going to buy it 'cause it's basically nearly the same as GA3 plus it has some good new features for multiple sites monitoring, but wanted to know if anyone other used it and has any feedback

Thanks

[edited by: not2easy at 9:51 pm (utc) on Jul 10, 2023]
[edit reason] please see Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[not2easy]

Hi Theo23 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Because Google announced the EoL for GA about a year ago, yes, there have been a few discussions about what we can do/use to replace it. One started last year and is still active: [webmasterworld.com...] though as yet, some are trying to work with GA4, others have moved to other options. It is a good question.

[DixonJones]

Hey Theo,
Welcome to WebmasterWorld.
I agree GA4 is a mess. I have two suggestions. One that our team uses alll the time is the analytics in GoSquared. But that product is not primarily used for analytics, so I imagine it won’t be good for many people. It is more of an online cms cone support system for SAAS products.

For this reason, we are planning to revisit something I used for years, which was called Piwik, but is now branded as “Matomo”. One great thing about Matomo… if you have enough hard drive space is that there is an open source version that you can host for free. It is not as hard as you think to install, especially if you use WordPress - although the WordPress plugin is not compatible with WordFence at the moment. There is also a version hosted on their servers. Which should work fine on any site including Wordpress. In the past I found it reliable and intuitive. Definitely worth a try.

[Theo23]

Thank you for your replies guys. I unfortunately have checked Piwik/Matomo but, apart from the real-time feature being not very useful (I preferred a lot the one of Universal Analytics)
- the self hosted version is a mess to manage and costs. i used it and then it sometimes overloaded my servers even with good specs
- if you go for the cloud version the prices rises a lot (I have 20mln+ pageviews per month websites)

This is why I tried other alternatives, and then moved to Publytics. As soon as my trial ends I think I’ll buy a monthly sub and keep using it because it seems to have very similar data to Universal Analytics and has exactly what I need (especially in real-time). I’ll let you know how it goes

[archiweb]

For 20m+ pageviews per month, matomo needs queued tracking with redis backend and archiving handled via cron run.
Once you configure your matomo instance, the maintenance is low and server costs are quite reasonable.

[EditorialGuy]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: https://www.webmasterworld.com/analytics/5089975.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 10:55 am on Aug 14, 2023 (utc +1)

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I've been playing around with Plausible Analytics as a replacement for Google Universal Analytics. I like it because of the real-time feature and (more important) the minimalist interface. It's a bit like a stripped-down Google UA.

But I do have one beef: It doesn't appear to let me drill down by directory. If I want to quickly see what's happening in the /topic/subtopic directory, I'm out of luck. Or am I just missing something?

(Note: I realize that I can use other tools for more in-depth data, but drilling down by directory seems pretty basic, and I'd like to have it in my "at a glance" analytics tool.)