Google Analytics' Privacy Approach Creates Indie Opportunities
If there’s one theme that’s emerged in our Indie Alternatives series thus far, it’s that indie hackers and their target customers highly value privacy and security.
And as the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more people to work and spend far more time online, more businesses and consumers are weighing the privacy, security, bias, and regulatory concerns that data analytics present.
Data analytics is a tremendous tool that enables marketers to pinpoint their sales efforts with remarkable precision. Consider, for example, that roughly a third of Amazon’s sales come via its recommendation algorithm, and YouTube’s algorithm spurs 70 percent of the content watched, according to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Google Analytics is by far the dominant force in data analytics. Now a few weeks after launching its revamped Google Analytics 4 with machine learning, Google’s platform is used by nearly 55 percent of the 10 million top sites analyzed by W3Techs. Such ubiquity is an obvious market advantage for the world’s largest ad-tech company, which can leverage tremendous amounts of user data to drive advertising sales.
But while Google Analytics may be on top, there are a host of powerful alternatives that offer users simpler tools, more transparency, and increased privacy.
Keep informed about the indie businesses taking on Big Tech:
Plausible Analytics provides a simplified, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. The streamlined tool offers conventional analytics metrics that one needs while simultaneously valuing user privacy.
Compliant with the ongoing wave of global privacy regulations, the open-source analytics tool shuns the use of cookies, anonymizes its site measurements, doesn’t collect personal data, avoids persistent identifiers, and has no cross-site tracking. Plausible also boasts a svelt 1 KB script that offers faster loading times when compared to Google Analytics’ bulkier 45 KB code. The approach seems to be paying off for Plausible, as the company is currently enjoying monthly recurring revenue of $7,680 with 1269 paying subscribers.
Fathom Analytics prides itself on simple, privacy-focused analytics tools. Via a single, easy-to-read screen, Fathom provides users data on their top content, top referrers, average time on site, bounce rate, and several other useful metrics. All Fathom plans include unlimited websites on your account, custom domains, and email reports.
Billing itself as a “privacy-first” company, Fathom doesn’t use cookies, anonymizes visitors’ data, never sells customer data, and has a limited number of third parties with which it shares data (such as Stripe for payment processing).
“We don’t market digital privacy because we think we can make fast money from it,” the company says. “We are a company that fundamentally believes in digital privacy and can’t fathom (bad pun, we know) building software without privacy in mind.”
Similar to other indie alternatives, Simple Analytics doesn’t use cookies or collect any personal data and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR privacy regulations. Simple’s clean layout offers a quick glance at key metrics, including page views, referrals, popular content, devices, browsers, and users’ countries. In addition to email reports and a tool that bypasses ad blockers, Simple offers users more insight into traffic generated from Twitter, allowing customers to see the specific tweet that garnered them a visitor.
In May, the company announced that it passed 400 customers with monthly recurring revenue of $5,451. “We see a bigger growth than normal. It’s likely due to our product being free for corona products. In exchange, we ask for a link back to the public stats of the project,” the company says.
What are your thoughts on privacy with data analytics companies? What are your favorite alternatives to Google Analytics?
100% agree. GA4's complexity + privacy issues opened a massive gap. But most alternatives went too minimal — just pageviews and referrers. There's room for something in between: privacy-first but feature-rich. That's what I built with Zenovay — AI insights, heatmaps, session replay, conversion funnels, uptime monitoring. All without cookies. The "privacy = basic" tradeoff is a myth.