Dec 12, 2022

What Are Some of the Best Alternatives to Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a powerful data-driven marketing tool and can be an extremely handy resource in understanding the impact of your business’s promotional efforts. There are, however, other analytics tools on the market that can help you transform insight into brand-boosting action. Each Google Analytics alternative in our list has features and functionality designed to dig deeper into your consumer data from several sources. Some of these tools offer free use while some are paid. Each tool on our list has slightly different unique selling points - so read through the options and gain a better understanding of which one will best suit your business’s needs.

Why consider an alternative to Google Analytics?

While Google Analytics is a go-to tool for marketers looking to optimize their campaigns and communications, the recent move to GA4 has changed the data-driven goal posts somewhat.

Unlike Google’s original GA platform (also known as Universal Analytics), GA4 doesn’t track website visits or sessions. Instead, GA4 measures mobile app and website engagements or interactions referred to as ‘events.’

The move to GA4 isn’t for everyone and if you’re looking to gather a well-rounded piece of the data-driven marketing pie, considering an alternative to Google Analytics is a wise move.

Read: A Guide to GA4 vs Universal Analytics to uncover all you need to know about the new version of Google Analytics.

Free alternative tools to Google Analytics

If GA4 isn’t for you or you’d like to broaden your horizons with some razor-sharp free analytical alternatives, here are some tools you should consider.

StatCounter

StatCounter is a tool that has been around for a while, but the user interface has remained very simplistic. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad product (especially considering it’s a free Google Analytics alternative); it simply looks a little more ‘old school’ than some other tools. The top-level data you need is all there, providing insights into visits, visitor paths, popular pages, entrance- and exit-pages, incoming keywords, and more.​

While it is a solid analytics option for marketers, it’s worth noting that in terms of segmentation, goals, campaign tracking, and slightly more advanced features, StatCounter lags behind the competition.

Key Features: StatCounter has a tool called Growth Plan that converts your web traffic data into actionable insights and helps you focus on key areas to achieve an increase in revenue. The problem is that the Growth Plan is an upgrade, and you must pay per month to use it.

Industry Rankings lets you see how your site stacks up against your competitors for traffic, social media, mobile traffic, and user experience, and the tool has a huge library of content of videos, articles, and e-books.

Overview: StatCounter is not as useful as other analytics tools, and doesn’t provide as many features – but it’s free to use.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics (OWA) is a free, open source web stats solution. Its user interface is reminiscent of the Google Analytics interface from around 2013.

Even though OWA is free to use it is feature-rich; it can track goals along several steps of a conversion funnel, offers stats filtered by multiple factors, and even displays heat maps and mouse-tracking.

Key Features: With Custom Variables it is possible to set and store up to five custom properties on all tracking events (for example, page views, sessions, clicks, or action events). Custom Variables can be set for a single tracking request, across all requests that make up a single session/visit, or across all visits for a single visitor.

Overview: OWA is a solid and feature-rich analytics solution. Unfortunately, it has the same bounce rate and time-on-site weaknesses of most analytics tools. It also looks like it’s not being updated very frequently.

Woopra

Woopra is a free alternative to Google Analytics designed to track, trace, monitor, and analyze every stage of the customer journey.

The platform’s free version is visually balanced and you don’t have to be a technical whizz to leverage it to your data-driven advantage. Woopra also integrates with over 50 leading marketing platforms or third-party services.

Key Features: This comprehensive platform is excellent at tracking very specific touchpoint-based interactions, allowing you to hone in on-page elements including CTA buttons, copy, email subscription click-throughs, and live chat engagement data. Invaluable nuggets of information that will empower you to optimize every stage of your user or customer journey.

Overview: The tool’s free version is robust and supports up to 500,000 actions while offering up to 90 days of data retention in addition to all of the core analytical insights you’d expect from a GA alternative. An insightful and robust part of any data-driven marketers toolkit.

Leadfeeder

Last but certainly not least in our free Google Analytics alternative list, Leadfeeder has a decidedly different feel to GA, but it offers a wealth of data-driven insight.

This free Google Analytics alternative boasts an incredibly intuitive interface, meaning you can master the basics in a matter of hours. It’s highly visual and as such, helps to uncover patterns in user or audience behavior at a glance.

Key Features: Perhaps one of Leadfeeder’s most striking features is the fact that it helps you to track and monitor any companies that interact with your website, rather than consumers alone. In addition to its B2B marketing capabilities, Leadfeeder also integrates with a range of popular web tools (including Mailchimp, Pipedrive, Zapier, and Google Data Studio) with ease.

Overview: Leaderfeeder’s free lite version is intuitive, reliable, and offers a solid mix of behavioral as well as engagement-based insight from both a B2B and B2C perspective. A free Google Analytics that can offer real value to marketers working with small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Paid Alternative Tools To Google Analytics

Crazy Egg

Our first paid Google Analytics alternative is from Crazy Eggs. This savvy platform lets you see what your customers are doing in real time. Thanks to its Heatmap tool, you can see exactly where your customers are clicking – it’s like a spy kit that helps you detect the most popular sections of your web pages. It also monitors scroll depth to provide insight regarding which section of your page is being read the most.

Key Features: Unlike other data tools that produce figures and trends, with Crazy Egg the experience is completely visual. This visual representation of results allows you to make better decisions on the positioning of page content, and on which areas to optimize. The page editor gives you the power to change whatever you want on the site in a very simple and user-friendly manner, meaning you can get in, change whatever you want, and get back out.

Crazy Egg also allows you to carry out A/B testing; and what’s more, the winner of the A/B test will be seamlessly pushed into the live version. You simply pick a goal based on a URL, form submission, or a clicked link/button, and then as soon as the platform detects a winning variant it will automatically send more traffic to the winner. This gives you as many conversions as possible without having to waste any traffic.

Overview: From the moment a visitor comes to your site, to the end of their session, you’ll see every movement of their cursor and everything they click on.

Kissmetrics

Another proud addition to our Google Analytics alternative list, Kissmetrics is a great analytics tool that helps you to acquire, keep, and grow your customer base, especially through its Customer Engagement Automation feature. From prospects to advocates, it allows for a deep understanding of – and unique engagement with – different customer profiles. You can identify which visitors are most likely to convert, for example, and focus your marketing efforts on the source of traffic that brings in the most conversions. And if people drop out of the sales funnel, you can also generate a list of those users and target them through other campaigns.

Key Features: A particularly handy feature is Kissmetrics’ Click to Track tool, which makes creating goals and events hassle free. You don’t need to write any code to set up analytics; with Click to Track you can simply use your mouse to add events by clicking on key elements of your website.

Overview: When you need to implement a Conversion Rate Optimization campaign and make sure that your sales funnels are performing optimally, Kissmetrics can help you achieve your CRO goals.

Adobe Analytics

This heavyweight piece of software aims to bring a high level of attribution across multiple channels and devices. Adobe Analytics uses Success events to measure conversions and takes data from multiple digital sources including voice, video, connected car, CRM, and the internet of things, to name but a few. Furthermore, it integrates with offline and enterprise data like loyalty programs to really get a full picture of the consumer journey towards a success event.

Key features: Multichannel online and offline data sources and custom variables which make data collection more robust and relevant to your own particular business. Adobe Analytics also offers integrated tag management so you can collect and share data across marketing systems without altering your website’s HTML code. It’s also possible to unlock the details of your marketing activity with advanced attribution modeling using multiple rules-based algorithms which can help you apply the most suitable model to your digital marketing activities when understood in terms of your audience insights. A further benefit of this aspect of Adobe Analytics is that it also helps detect anomalies in website interaction.

Overview: Adobe Analytics is best suited to large enterprise level organizations with a strong digital presence. Its five figure price tag means it’s generally out of reach for most organizations, but its incredible channel integrations both offline and online are something most analysts can dream of.

Heap

​​Heap Analytics is an impressive Google Analytics alternative, and its main focus is on user friendliness. The idea is that you can easily set up tracking for all the important events on your site without needing major technical skills.

Heap’s setup actively encourages you to create the tracking and reports that are actually useful for you. It doesn’t overwhelm you with endless stats and screens. Instead, it guides you through the process of building your own reports, based on your particular business needs.

Key Features: Beyond installing tracking code on your website, everything in Heap is done with a point-and-click interface, somewhat similar to Kissmetrics. What sets it apart is that you can define custom events by clicking directly on buttons and forms on your site and telling Heap what you want it to track in relation to them.

In addition, Heap automatically tracks events on your websites and shows you a list of the most commonly performed events, which you can then label and classify. It even does this retroactively. So, if you decide to track a new event today, it will give you stats for this from the past, all the way back to the moment you installed the Heap tracking code.

Overview: The result of all this is that Heap is incredibly easy to set up and use. In terms of user friendliness, Heap is the opposite of Google Analytics. In fact, Heap is an absolute joy to set up and use.

 

Updated 2023

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We hope you’ve found our Google Analytics alternative guide helpful and to squeeze maximum value from the tools you use, learning how to work with data on a deeper level is the way forward.

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Cathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst & eCommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.

Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer and digital trainer. He specialises in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC & SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting and optimisition.  Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.

Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local & international experience working with top B2B & B2C brands across multiple industries.

Over his career, Cathal has worked Client-Side, in Digital Marketing Agencies and Media Owners with brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus and Expedia.

He can be reached on LinkedIn here.

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