Switching and alternatives
A privacy-first alternative to GA4
What you gain, what you give up, and which tool to pick depending on why you are leaving.
5 tools compared
Guides
Guides to picking an analytics tool
25 research-led guides, each ending in a recommendation and a table you can check. Grouped by the question you arrived with.
These are the questions people actually type, rather than the categories vendors organise themselves around. Somebody escaping a consent banner, somebody wiring analytics into a Next.js build and somebody trying to work out why their checkout leaks are three different problems, and a single "best tools" list serves none of them well.
Every guide names a recommendation rather than leaving you with a list, sets out the rest of the field with scores, and says where the recommendation is the wrong answer. The scoring method is published in full.
Switching and alternatives
The searches people make when they have already decided to replace something.
Google Tag Manager and tagging
What GTM is, what it is not, whether you need it, and what to do about the tags it was deployed to carry.
Google Tag Manager and tagging
Google Tag Manager, explained
What GTM is, what it definitely is not, and why so many people believe it is an analytics tool.
6 tools compared
Google Tag Manager and tagging
Do you need Google Tag Manager?
A tag manager earns its place on some sites and is pure overhead on others. Here is the test, and the costs on each side.
6 tools compared
Google Tag Manager and tagging
Google Tag Manager alternatives
Why teams leave GTM, what the open-source and privacy-first options actually offer, and when the answer is no tag manager at all.
6 tools compared
Google Tag Manager and tagging
Server-side tagging, explained
What moving your tags to a server actually buys you, what it costs to run, and the cheaper way to get most of the benefit.
6 tools compared
Privacy, compliance and governance
Cookies, consent, GDPR, retention and access, and where your visitors' data ends up.
Privacy, compliance and governance
Cookieless web analytics, explained
How counting visitors without a cookie actually works, what the different approaches can and cannot promise, and which tools do it properly.
6 tools compared
Privacy, compliance and governance
If DuckDuckGo built an analytics tool
Take their published privacy principles, apply them to web analytics, and see what specification falls out. It is a more specific document than you would expect.
Speculation6 tools compared
Privacy, compliance and governance
GDPR compliant analytics tools
What the regulation actually asks of an analytics tool, which claims are meaningful, and the questions worth putting to a vendor before you sign.
5 tools compared
Privacy, compliance and governance
Analytics without a consent banner
The banner is costing you more than you think. Here is how to measure the damage and which tools let you remove it.
5 tools compared
Privacy, compliance and governance
Self hosted web analytics
What running your own analytics actually costs, which projects are worth the operational burden, and when the honest answer is not to.
6 tools compared
Privacy, compliance and governance
Heatmaps without cookies
Every well-known heatmap tool sets cookies and needs a consent banner. Here is the way round that, and what it costs.
5 tools compared
Privacy, compliance and governance
Data governance for analytics
Retention, access, ownership and the event dictionary. The unglamorous work that decides whether anybody trusts your numbers in two years.
6 tools compared
For your stack
What to install given what you have already built, and what it costs you.
For your stack
Analytics for Next.js
Client-side routing breaks naive pageview tracking. Here is what to install, where to put it, and what the platform-native option costs you.
6 tools compared
For your stack
React website tracking
Single-page apps break the assumptions most analytics makes. What to check before you trust a single number.
5 tools compared
For your stack
The lightest analytics script
Script sizes compared, what the weight actually costs in Core Web Vitals, and how to measure the bill your analytics is handing your visitors.
6 tools compared
For your stack
E-commerce analytics software
Revenue attribution, checkout funnels and the privacy problem nobody mentions until the security review.
6 tools compared
For your stack
SaaS product analytics tools
Product analytics answers different questions from web analytics, costs more in every sense, and is regularly bought for the wrong half of the site.
6 tools compared
For your stack
Analytics for Shopify stores
What Shopify's built-in reports already cover, why you cannot simply paste a script into checkout any more, and what to add.
6 tools compared
The job you need doing
Measuring traffic, watching it live, building funnels, recording events and counting conversions.
The job you need doing
How to track website traffic
The five numbers worth watching, how to start measuring them today, and the mistakes that make analytics useless six months in.
5 tools compared
The job you need doing
Real time visitor tracking
When watching traffic live is genuinely useful, when it is a distraction, and which tools do it without tracking individuals.
5 tools compared
The job you need doing
Website event tracking
How to design events you will still understand in a year, what they cost you in most pricing models, and which tools handle them well.
5 tools compared
The job you need doing
Custom conversion tracking
How to define conversions that mean something, build a funnel that survives scrutiny, and avoid the attribution arguments that waste everyone's time.
6 tools compared
The job you need doing
Web analytics for a small business
What a small business actually needs to measure, what it can safely ignore, and how to spend either nothing or about nine dollars sensibly.
6 tools compared
The job you need doing
Web traffic analytics explained
What the category actually covers, what each metric really counts, and why no two tools ever agree on the same website.
6 tools compared
The job you need doing
Funnel analytics, done properly
Designing a funnel that survives scrutiny, reading the drop-off honestly, and which tools include funnels at what price.
6 tools compared