are your web statistics really accurate?
In today’s world people are a lot more switched on with what happens with their data online. Governments and organisations around the world are making more of an effort to protect our data through the likes of GDPR and CCPA (for our American readers) and companies need to adapt to this.
So, what does that actually have to do with your web statistics?
google analytics
Google truly is a powerhouse when it comes to pretty much anything digital, but our main focus for now is tracking your website traffic. The “go to” web analytic tool that most marketers and business owners use is Google Analytics.
Google analytics uses cookies in order to track visitors to your website. If you aren’t sure what cookies are then take a look at this neat article. Google Analytics assigns a unique identifier to your website visitor and stores it in a small text file with data, which is essentially a “cookie” on the user’s device. When that user visits a website that has Google Analytics installed, the analytics script retrieves the identifier from the cookie and uses it to track your activity on the site.
Since laws like GDPR and CCPA came into effect, the way Google uses cookies fell into a bit of a grey area, and were no longer compliant with the new data protection regulations. This caused quite a stir in the community about web analytics as customers now have to opt-in for a website to set tracking cookies (those pesky cookie consent banners everywhere)!
If a user doesn’t opt in, then Google Analytics can’t track them and that can have an affect on the accuracy of your web analytics. However, it doesn’t end there.
consumer’s cookie settings
In addition to a user not opting in to receive cookies, they also have additional control through their chosen web browser (e.g. Chrome, Firefox or Safari) to manage their own cookie settings.
Browsers now provide users with the ability to block certain types of cookies, from 3rd party cookies to all cookies (although this isn’t recommended).
If a user has all cookies blocked, then that means that Google Analytics isn’t able to track that user at all, as they won’t have the Google Analytics cookie set, even if they accept the cookies on your website.
So, are your web statistics truly accurate?
plausible
This is where we introduce Plausible which is a GDPR and CCPA compliant web analytics tool that is made and hosted within the EU. The biggest difference between Google Analytics and Plausible, is that Plausible doesn’t use cookies to track visitors on your website.
Plausible utilises a script which is added somewhere in the <head> tag of your website, that generates a random string of numbers and letters and this is used to track your web visitors. It is definitely a great alternative for brands to adopt as more consumers become more and more aware of their privacy online.
And even better yet, Plausible is fully Open Source, and we love working with Open Source projects here at Wirebox. So, we decided to run a little experiment.
our little experiment
It is clear that there are some key differences between Google Analytics and Plausible, from implementation to what is tracked and the depth of that tracking. However, we wanted to know the differences between the two websites, so we compared the two web analytics tools for a month!
We found:
- That Plausible is much more lightweight than Google Analytics, it was quicker to load our data
- Both Plausible and Google Analytics managed to keep track of active users on the website fairly equally
- Plausible shows that we had around 600 more unique website visitors than Google Analytics, as well as an extra 600 page views.
- Our bounce rate in both was exactly the same at 80% (We will need to work on that!)
- The same with our average session duration of 59 seconds
- We can see our top pages and sources in both platforms and even breakdown the statistics by location and device.
- Google provided us with greater insight into the user journeys on our website which are key for UX research.
summary
Overall, we’re really happy with what Plausible has been working on and have recommended it to our clients, as there is a clear difference in the amount of unique visitors and page views between the two analytics tools.
We think that rather than choosing one or the other, you need to utilise both tools together to get the most out of your analytics and ensure that they are as accurate as possible, so you know what is and isn’t working.
Don’t forget! Google will be sunsetting Universal Analytics on the 1st July 2023 in favour of GA4. Make sure you’re prepared! We’ve written a handy blog with all the details you need to know!
