Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

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A plausible alternative depends on your use case. If you just want basic numbers (visitors, visits, page views, few interactions tracked) one can probably chose any of the myriad of alternatives like fathom, Plausible, Matomo, and so on.

While with most of them you get what I would call "vanity metrics" (so not really actionable, more or less just "numbers go up or down") at least Matomo (self hosted) provides the ability to create essentially the experience of a free GA3 implementation.

If you "just" had a code drop of basic GA3 code: just use whatever floats your boat. If you have custom dimensions, user interactions tracked as events, goals and stuff like that in the free GA3 version - go with Matomo (self hosted). Configure Matomo to have more than 5 custom dimensions (easy to do) and you can replicate (nearly) everything from your GA3 implementation.

Only things you will be missing in any case is integration with Search Console and Google Ads.

> While with most of them you get what I would call "vanity metrics" (so not really actionable, more or less just "numbers go up or down")

This comment couldn't have come at a better time for me. I was just trying to compare the free analytics available and plausible looked okay to me. But since I haven't done anything actionable yet I think I'll research a little more.

> so not really actionable

What would you define as actionable metrics? Are you talking about the custom page triggers like scroll depth, click on obl, etc? Can you recommend what are the biggest actionable events for a saas site since you have experience with it?

My source of knowledge on this is sadly a few youtube tutorials but if there is any resource you would recommend I'd highly appreciate the link.

Actionable depends on your needs. As always the typical answer you receive from an analyst is: It depends.

Sorry, couldn't resist the in joke of the team I am part of.

But let me try an example. Visits as a global metric don't tell you much. They go up, they go down. And even if you do different marketing things (like SEA, newsletters, social media marketing, organic social and so on) and only look at visits from NY of these channels that doesn't tell you much (except for the volume).

But if you look at what a visit from every one of these channels costs you on average we are getting somewhere. Add into the mix the conversion rate for every one of these channels (depending on your goals it could be e-commerce conversions, newsletter sign-ups, sign-ups for a platform and so on). Now you can already see cost per acquisition/visit and cost per conversion.

So now you can answer the question about what marketing efforts bring more bang for the buck.

That is one example of how I define actionable metrics. Metrics that help you/enable you to make better business decisions.

How I would structure and report things depends on the business. But maybe this gives you an idea already.

Wow that's such an insightful comment. Never really thought about that. Puts my whole thinking about website analytics in a new light.

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this. After some initial research I see not using UTM tracking tags(1) in all my URLs (or redirects) is a big mistake. So duly noted. You're right about one thing though that since there is no direct integration with Adwords / GWM you're losing out on a lot of info using anything else other than GA.

(1) https://plausible.io/blog/utm-tracking-tags

You are very welcome.

In the end you are not loosing this data. It is just one step removed. So you need to think about extracting it from Google Ads into Excel/Google Sheets (or an external dashboarding solution) and combining it with a data extract from your analytics solution.

And if you do more, like social media advertising, Microsoft Ads (think Bing) or Twitter they all don't easily integrate into Google Analytics. For all of them you would need to look ad the marketing performance in the platform specific tool and combine this with your on site metrics as described above.

Additionally you would want to take the consent rate into account (if serving European customers). Many of the consent solutions provide this number so that you can use it to adjust things like CPO (cost per order) or cost per visit (CPV) as you are probably not seeing 20 to 60 percent of your traffic due to consent not given. This depends massively on your target audience and the countries you are serving. I have seen this range at multiple international clients of mine for different brands and markets.

So GA having this integration is nice but definitely not sufficient for marketing.

Even when thinking about the integrations for the (quite expensive) paid offerings of GA and DV360 and the likes.

> alternatives like fathom, Plausible, Matomo

I don't know why people classify fathom and Plausible in the same category as Google Analytics. There's a clear distinction between an analytics software and a counter.

Matomo has some features but I can never like it's cluttered interfaces that don't lead to immediate actionable intels.

PostHog is another alternative.

There is a continuum of alternatives from tool like fathom, plausible on the more 'vanity metrics' side, GA4, Matomo and others somewhere around the middle and the fully custom corporate actionable solutions like the offerings from Adobe (and others) or custom built solutions.

It depends on what the people needs or want. A smallish blog has different needs that a global company with multiple brands in different markets doing e-commerce, brand advertising and what not (think VW or BMW). And a medium sized B2B e-commerce shop has again differing needs.

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