Piotr Korzeniowski, CEO at Piwik PRO: The market for analytics software has been very dynamic lately. New privacy regulations, and the sunset of Universal Analytics (UA), to name a few, caused a discussion around different options regarding analytics software. What factors are the most important for marketers when choosing an analytics tool?
Jason Packer, Analytics Engineer and Owner at Quantable Analytics: While analytics technology has always changed quickly, it seems we are at an inflection point in the maturity of analytics and tracking. This dynamism and variety of options have made the decision process more challenging. Knowing how to come up with requirements and create a framework for tool evaluation is a lot of work, but it can pay off in the long run.
The first half of my book is about creating this framework: learning the right questions to ask before signing up for a demo of any tool. The questions and the practice are more important than the tool itself. There’s no such thing as “the best Google Analytics alternative.” It’s about finding a solution that fits a particular use case well enough to empower your analytics practice.
Piotr Korzeniowski: The news that Google will sunset Universal Analytics and replace it with its very different successor, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), has caused a lot of commotion. How did the community of marketers and analysts react to this news?
Jason Packer: “Commotion” is definitely the right word. That will only grow in volume as we approach the UA sunset date and business stakeholders become more widely involved, even though Google had made the decision about moving away from UA clear years ago. When they announced the sunset date, the broader industry started to pay attention.
GA4 has had the most positive reaction among technically-oriented analysts, who can appreciate how it is significantly more sophisticated than UA. Also, they are not bothered by the move toward BigQuery and Looker Studio. The reaction has been primarily negative among the SEO community, who do a lot of ad-hoc analysis and focus on inbound traffic more than on-site activity, especially those who work with significant numbers of small individual sites.
While analytics technology has always changed quickly, it seems we are at an inflection point in the maturity of analytics and tracking. Knowing how to come up with requirements and create a framework for tool evaluation is a lot of work, but it can pay off in the long run.
Jason Packer
Piotr Korzeniowski: Why should marketers consider GA alternatives? What challenges may an organization face if they migrate to another analytics platform, and what benefits can it bring?
Jason Packer: Despite the title of my book being “Google Analytics Alternatives,” I dislike framing other web analytics tools as “alternatives.” Certainly, GA is far and away the most widely installed web analytics tool, but it shouldn’t be treated as the default one. Other solutions shouldn’t be considered only after GA has been found problematic, but evaluated on their own merits per use case. The most effective solution may still be GA4, but we shouldn’t assume that will always be true.
Migrations can be very challenging, but with the sunset of UA, we are at a junction where everyone using traditional GA has to migrate — either to GA4 or something else. I’ve encouraged people to view this as an opportunity to improve their implementations.
Spend some time re-evaluating rather than rushing through a migration that attempts to simply replicate legacy installations. If an organization has years of UA experience behind them, they are bound to find improvements if they do an informed migration.
Even though the UA sunset date is fast approaching, spending a little more time and effort now could save a lot of headaches in the future. Letting Google auto-migrate your UA property to GA4 is even worse, potentially putting off decisions about your implementation until a point where there is no UA data being actively recorded to help fine-tune the migration.
Piotr Korzeniowski: What prompted you to approach the topic of Google Analytics alternatives and publish a book about it? Have you seen the demand for this type of publication before? What was your approach to the subject and the writing process from behind the scenes?
Jason Packer: I’ve always been interested in various analytics tools and wanted more deep and unbiased analyses of those tools. Especially when I started writing the book in April 2022, much of what I could find was top ten lists containing reworded marketing claims from vendors rather than real-world evaluations. I felt it was essential to have actually used the products evaluated, not just seen demos.
My approach to writing is to investigate questions I am curious about for myself, rather than trying to fill some demand. In this case, I was confident other people had the same questions I had, so I put in the additional effort of creating a book.
Spend some time re-evaluating rather than rushing through a migration that attempts to simply replicate legacy installations. If an organization has years of UA experience behind them, they are bound to find improvements if they do an informed migration.
Jason Packer
Piotr Korzeniowski: For your book, you had to research every analytics vendor thoroughly. Can you share any teaser insights from your findings for your book? What exciting trends and tendencies did you observe while analyzing so closely different options on the market?
Jason Packer: One of the most interesting things I noticed were two opposing trends. One was a trend towards tool unification, where a single tool (or tool suite) can provide a wide range of solutions: web analytics, product analytics, consent management, tag management, session capture, a/b testing, site speed monitoring, site uptime monitoring, etc. Matomo is a good example of this, offering many of those features.
The countervailing trend was towards very high degrees of customization and depth within data collection itself. Snowplow is a good example of this, offering a deep and customizable data collection platform far beyond what UA can do.
Piwik PRO is taking a well-considered middle road with these two trends — offering a fairly broad set of solutions (web analytics, tag management, consent management, and CDP) while providing depth and sophistication in the core analytics.
With UA, a single-page small business site with 100 sessions a month was running the same tool as a complex ecommerce site with millions of pages and sessions, both for free!
Those two use cases require different solutions: a simplified web analytics tool for the former and an enterprise-level tool for the latter. UA tried to be everything to everyone, and while it succeeded at that to a surprising degree, that’s not a model the industry is likely to follow going forward.
Piotr Korzeniowski: Since you received positive feedback from the analytics community after your first book, do you plan to write another one? Are there any analytics-related topics you would like to explore further in the future?
Jason Packer: The analytics community has been very supportive, which I really appreciate! The main reason I wrote the book was to share knowledge that might help other analysts, so hearing from readers that my book could do that is what it’s all about.
If you asked me the day after I published if I’d write another book, I’d have said: “never again”! Now that some time has passed, it would be fun to write another one… So we’ll see. I’ll likely go back to blogging for a while (hopefully at a higher frequency than before). Currently, I’m most interested in privacy and consent, bot detection, and site speed.
Jason Packer
Analytics Engineer and Owner at Quantable Analytics
Jason runs Quantable Analytics, a small consultancy focused on growth-stage companies looking to mature their data practices. Prior to Quantable, Jason held a wide range of jobs in IT: Unix sysadmin, ISP network tech, SEO specialist, front end engineer, etc.
