Help me with Google Analytics? Or convince me to use something else?
I have 5-6 different websites whose traffic/metrics I'd like to track on a single dashboard.
I was quite the noob when I began building them, so I just resorted to simple Google Analytics. And to aggregate the data into one dashboard, I used Google Data Studio (my embedded dashboard should be public here)
But the solution seems janky, and I had to manually setup many small things within Google Data Studio to make this work, as Google Analytics does not let you view data behind all your properties/websites at once.
Does anyone have a better solution? I am open to moving away from Google Analytics, especially because I realize there are some data privacy concerns, but ideally for another free solution because I have 0 revenue from these projects still :(
If there is not many good options, I am thinking about building something of my own and productizing it :)
EDIT: I am looking for something very plug-and-play, working out of the box to get all the basic metrics easily. GA just allows you to insert a few lines in the html and you're good!
Thanks in advance!
Privacy-friendly and cookie-free web analytics: https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet
Will take a look! Thanks for the suggestion
If you're after web analytics (impressions, bounce rate, etc.) there's a whole bunch of alternatives. Here's a list of ethical ones that don't track users or harvest data:
https://tabler.one/share/88db9c0b699748f1606a4c46b961c605
I recommend and use Plausible.
If you are after product usage analytics (standard + custom events), these are the ones I came across in my research:
https://tabler.one/share/9f060c621578b1400823effb28b87c5e
We wanted to go with Heap, but it doesn't support browser extensions use-case, so we went with Mixpanel.
I'm not sure about which one would be the easiest to achieve cross-site data aggregation. Usually people want to keep data separate. Product analytics let you set-up your own reports and dashboards, but I have experience using only one dataset.
If you're after something more exotic/custom, here's a full-list:
https://tabler.one/share/eb01bd4cef2976e6e5c9bea223e0629c
Wow thanks so much for curating this! There's a lot to go through :)
I do think not everyone looks for what I'm looking for - cross-site, and very out-of-the-box.. So hopefully I can find what I'm looking for through your lists.
Tabler.one looks pretty interesting! I will say though, it was difficult to figure out what the product does.. Content curation and tabs maintenance have a lot of overlap but I couldn't tell which Tabler.one was focused on
If you're primary goal is track user behavior on your sites then I'd recommend Mixpanel. It does give some info about referrals and connects to adwords and other things. You can configure the level of privacy to your liking. The dashboard and funnel tools are excellent.
The one downside is you'll need to know a little javascript and it'll take some time to set it up. It doesn't work out of the box like GA, it's a fully custom analytics tool.
Took me about a day to do a comprehensive roll out on everything in our web app.
They also have a free version for startups!
Yeah I've tried out MixPanel. I'm not looking to track specific behavior, more just basic metrics like traffic, page views, and ideally out of box like GA.
If your main problem is the data viewing and not the privacy part, consider importing your data into metabase and creating custom dashboards there.
Yeah, had considered that, but Google Data Studio makes more sense to me than starting from scratch.. Thanks for input though!
In that case, if you want to see some alternatives, take a look here: https://nomoregoogle.com