You may have been living under a rock, as a digital marketer, for the last few weeks and missed the “news” that Google Analytics finally gave Universal Analytics a depreciation date (or two to be precise, one for free users and one for 360 users).
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Two and a half years ago, we introduced Google Analytics 4 to address evolving measurement standards and help businesses succeed. Today, we’re announcing that we’ll begin sunsetting Universal Analytics next year.
Learn more about what to expect → https://t.co/QPGatOiZLB pic.twitter.com/zRVkds6hir
— Google Analytics (@googleanalytics) March 16, 2022
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So if you are tempted to look at alternatives what are the options
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As an example, on Sanctuary Foundation, a website I am proud to be part of, which is helping to help Ukrainian refugees get to the UK and assist them in the UK. The Sanctuary Foundation utilises FREE Matomo analytics, this is amongst the most customisable solutions for analytics, has some of the most strict privacy features and yet can be the most feature rich.
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Another well used analytics solution, with a FREE core, is PIWIK. It is GDPR compliant out of the gate but can also be used in compliance with any consent manager you may have on your website, it can be used with Google Tag Manager and has a great API integration platform too (including for tools such as Power BI).
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There are of course paid versions of the above analytics solutions too, and that brings us to the next analytics solution.
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Oribi, is a great analytics solution which is built with funnels in mind. It is ideal for businesses and ecommerce in mind. It isn’t for your everyday website however. The cost is based on the number of monthly visitors you have (visits not pageviews), you get a discount is you pay annually.
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My final analytics solution, isn’t one I often recommend. However, if you are an Enterprise business with a large audience then Adobe Analytics may well be the solution for you. However, I need to be clear, the data when compared to Google Analytics isn’t going to match and you need to be prepared for that. You also need to be prepared for a mismatch of naming practices of Adobe and GA. However, the data is accurate, and as with all the systems mentioned its feature rich, privacy focused and works amazingly well. Adobe Analytics is perhaps the most expensive platform I recommend (that isn’t GA360) and honestly, it is worth it if you need it — but you need a big audience to make it work.
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(Read my full article on Find The Gaps on Medium)
