Google Analytics

As someone that has been in the web development, SEO, and SEM area for over a decade now, I've had my fair share of experiences with Google Analytics.

The biggest benefit of Google Analytics is that it's free. But with that, it's because they are benefiting more from your website analytics than they would be otherwise.

They've been the go-to for over a decade now, but finally people seem to be pushing back on "being the product". That's where privacy-focused website analytics tools like Fathom Analytics have been gaining popularity of lately.

What's more is with all of this data collection that Google does, the scripts you put on your site are quite heavy (which will impact page speed and overall performance). To the extent that Google themselves don't even use Google Analytics because it would hurt performance so heavily.

The only reason we might still recommend Google Analytics would be because you rely heavily on SEM (Google Ads) and you want Google to have all of your conversion tracking data to hopefully improve Ad performance.

That said, we know many people that use a tool like Fathom alongside Google Ads no problem.

If you're using Google Analytics UA, you will have seen this banner popping up the past month:

Which is the final nail in the coffin for us (but maybe not for the reason you're thinking). So why then? We couldn't even migrate the historical UA data from the past decade to GA4—genuinely wtf Google?

While some think that it might be because Google was ordered to delete all of this data by the European government as it was completely breaking GDPR (and was technically determined as illegal), the piece that doesn't make total sense is that tools like Fathom have an amazing Google Analytics UA and GA4 importer tool which allows you to pull that data out with a click of a button.

This is quite serious... All of this has resulted in Google having to actually shut down Google Analytics Universal Analytics (UA) to replace it with a more barebones and confusing GA4 version just so they were no longer breaking privacy laws. That's right, Google Analytics UA was not GDPR compliant 🤯

The thing is, GA4 is incredibly confusing to set up, and is incredibly confusing to navigate the data, and it won't have any of your historical UA data. Not to mention your current and future data is not even stored indefinitely, Google can delete it whenever they want—you're not paying for it.

And that's why we've switched to Fathom Analytics from Google Analytics 4 years ago and haven't looked back ever since!