Website analytics platform for bloggers and content creators
Many people create content on their personal websites and blogs. There are many motivations behind this. Some use it like a diary, some as a hobby, or as a way to connect to other people, as a way to build an audience, make money and even improve their career opportunities.
For some of these content creators, external recognition is not that important. They write what they want, about things they are interested in and they publish whatever they please. The fun is in the writing and the creative process itself.
Others like to understand the impact that their efforts have on the world, which posts bring in the readers, what topics people seem to enjoy the most and even how people end up discovering their content in the first place.
- Web analytics give you a strong signal
- Google Analytics is complicated to use and understand
- Google Analytics requires a privacy policy, cookie prompt and user consent
- Google Analytics slows down your site and worsens the visitor experience
- Google Analytics is blocked by many web users
- Give Plausible Analytics a chance
Web analytics give you a strong signal
This helps motivate them to put even more effort, publish more of the content that people enjoy the most and create a better website experience in general.
And this is where website analytics come into the picture. Web analytics give website owners and bloggers a strong signal on what they have achieved, what worked well and what not so well. This helps them improve and better organize their future efforts.
Google Analytics is the obvious and the default choice for most websites. Even though it is a very useful and powerful tool used on the majority of websites on the web, it brings several issues that distract site owners from what they enjoy doing the most.
Here’s a look at why we created Plausible Analytics as a great Google Analytics alternative for content creators and their personal websites and blogs.
Google Analytics is complicated to use and understand
Google Analytics collects so much data from website visitors that it can showcase more than 125 different reports and almost 300 individual metrics. You as a site owner will rarely have a need for more than a handful of these. This makes Google Analytics an overkill for the majority of bloggers.
Many try to simplify Google Analytics by creating custom reports and custom dashboards. Some even take Google Analytics training courses in order to learn how to use it, how to understand the different metrics and extract actionable insights from them.
If you just want to publish content and interact with people, learning about analytics is not something you put on top of your priority list. So you end up ignoring Google Analytics. You keep it installed on your site and it keeps tracking your visitors but you don’t really get much value from it.
Plausible Analytics is built with simplicity in mind. Anyone can understand all the metrics we present at a glance and without having any training or prior analytics experience. Everything you need to know is on one page.
You can get an overview of all the most actionable metrics in one minute and get on with tasks that you enjoy more such as creating new content or engaging with your audience.
Google Analytics requires a privacy policy, cookie prompt and user consent
There are several requirements for using Google Analytics. Some from Google’s side and others from the different privacy regulations.
Google for instance requires you to have a privacy policy with details on your usage of Google Analytics.
“You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies, identifiers for mobile devices or similar technology used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data. You will use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that a User is provided with clear and comprehensive information about, and consents to, the storing and accessing of cookies or other information on the User’s device where such activity occurs in connection with the Service and where providing such information and obtaining such consent is required by law.”
On top of this, Google Analytics places multiple cookies on the machines of your visitors which means that you need to ask for cookie consent from your visitors too.
These are things that many site owners and bloggers simply don’t want to nor have the time or capacity to deal with. And the value that Google Analytics provides may not be worth it in terms of what it takes to have it running with regards to dealing with privacy policy and cookie consent.
Plausible Analytics is compatible with the different privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and PECR out of the box. We don’t use cookies and we don’t collect any personal data from your visitors either. This means that you don’t need to have a privacy policy regarding Plausible Analytics and you don’t need to have a cookie banner nor ask to get consent from your visitors.
You keep your site simple, clean and optimized for your visitors. No need to put any time and effort into legal aspects. You can focus on the more creative side of things.
Google Analytics slows down your site and worsens the visitor experience
Google Analytics is a bloated script that collects a lot of unnecessary data and it’s not useful for the majority of site owners. This can lead to your site having slower loading times. It is common that the different speed tests including Google’s own PageSpeed Insights flag Google Analytics as one of the elements that slow down a site.
Every KB can make a difference if you want to optimize for speed. Plausible Analytics script is lightweight. Your site will keep loading fast and your visitors will have a smooth experience.
Google Analytics is blocked by many web users
Google Analytics is the most widely used tracking script on the web. This makes it a big target. Browsers such as Brave and Firefox block it, so do the different ad-blocking extensions such as the uBlock Origin.
These are used by millions of web users who won’t be counted in your website statistics. It’s not uncommon to see 40% or even more of the audience on a tech website blocking Google Analytics.
Plausible Analytics is a new player on this market and it’s privacy-friendly by default, so it doesn’t see the same level of blockage. We also have a proxy that allows you to run our script as a first party connection from your domain name. You may very well see more accurate (and higher) visitor numbers.
Give Plausible Analytics a chance
Register for a free 30-day trial account to test Plausible Analytics on your site. It’s so lightweight that you can run it alongside Google Analytics without any impact on your site loading time.
The 30 days of the free trial should give you enough time to explore Plausible Analytics and figure out how it fits with your needs and your workflow compared to Google Analytics.
You can even bring your old Google Analytics stats to Plausible with our Google Analytics importer.
