Why I'm switching from Google Analytics to Plausible

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Website traffic isn't everything.

In fact, for many of us, it's low priority on our list of business metrics. And yet, we find ourselves wondering what we can learn from analytics. Shouldn't we get more data-informed about our online presence?

Yes, to an extent!

Website traffic is often your earliest signal that your marketing activities are working. You can learn how people are finding you long before they ever talk to you. But rather than looking at how much traffic you're getting, for a small business owner, it's often more insightful to focus on where your traffic is coming from.

Sometimes, you'll see leading indicators that a blog post is picking up steam on Google, or your LinkedIn DM strategy actually might be working, or a partner's event is leading people to check out your site.

If you have a website, it's probably worth hooking up website analytics. Most people use Google Analytics because it's free and because it's Google. But Google Analytics is also one of the most difficult analytics systems to use. (In my past life as a growth designer for tech companies, I wrote and spoke extensively about how much I hated Google Analytics.)

We were all hoping that this new version of Google Analytics would be easier and better to use. But honestly, it's still pretty terrible.

So I went looking for alternatives and I found one I really love. It's called Plausible.

There's four reasons I love Plausible for understanding website traffic…

1) It verifies FOR YOU: No joke–Google Analytics doesn't do this. When you first install your analytics tag, you have to verify yourself in “Realtime” data that it's tracking properly like it's the 1990s.

2) It shows me ONLY what I care about: traffic sources, top pages, where people started on the site, where they left from, cities and devices. That's it. No more extra nonsense charts and graphs to get lost in.

3) It shows traffic sources in an easy to understand way: Back to my earlier point. This is one of the most valuable things to be looking at in your analytics. Google buries it in complexity. But in Plausible, it's right at the top of your (only) dashboard in an easy to understand list.

4) You can dive deeper with one click: Let's say you want to know how people are getting to a certain page of your site. Click on that page in Top Pages and boom, there you are. In the screenshot above, I've filtered by a page I care about (on the right) and I've clicked into Google (on the left) to see the exact search phrases people used to get there. Plausible is integrated with my Google Search Console which is where it pulls that data from, in a way that is hilariously so much better than Google ever would.

The bonus of Plausible is that they are small tech (in contrast to huge tech) and they are privacy-focused (they don't track individuals and they don't use cookies). For those of us who want to know more about our audience but also hate surveillance, this is great news.

If you're using a website as part of your marketing efforts, I recommend checking Plausible out. It's not free, but it's cheap. It's $9/month or $90/year. For me, the price is well worth not having to fuss with Google. I can answer my questions about what's working and what's not much more quickly.

P.S. If you're not sure whether or not you should bother with analytics at all, check out my post “Do you need analytics for your small business?”

P.P.S. If you made it this far, you can actually check out my live Plausible dashboard and see for yourself how it works.

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Super Easy Digital is an independent business owned and operated by Lex Roman. I'm focused on empowering solopreneurs to find and book their best clients in sustainable ways. I love connecting with people not only about projects but also about partnering and supporting each other in our quest for that freedom lifestyle.