Toolkit

Your GA replacement choice

GA4 Final decision-making exercise

Step 1 of 5

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This interactive tool is designed to guide you towards a good candidate tool for you to replace your legacy Google Analytics with. The exercise will ask you a series of questions (up to 8) until we have enough information to make a recommendation.

Answer these questions to the best of your ability based on what you've learned and documented through the previous inventory exercise and other materials we've released.

If you haven't taken advantage of our previous materials, we encourage you to start at the beginning of PTKO's GA Decision-Making Toolkit

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Name

First Last

Email(Required)

By providing your email address above, we will be able to send you a summary of what you enter into this form.

How much will you use analytics(Required)

Replacing your legacy analytics will take effort. What you do next depends on how and even whether you'll use whatever you build next.

Significantly. Analytics is a priority for our team

Moderately. Our capacity to use data is limited but important

Minimally. We rarely use data and aren't likely to anytime soon

Do you want to confront the lack of data adoption with leadership?(Required)

Migrating analytics will take effort. The retirement of Universal Analytics is a unique moment that can force an organization to reckon with it's analytics capability. If it isn't going to be used, it may or may not be worth the effort of setting up anything at all.

No confrontation, we would prefer that the state of our analytics remains a non-issue

Yes, now is the time to confront the status quo and change the way we use data

Can you dedicate time/budget to a new analytics tool?(Required)

Do you have someone technical on staff able to dedicate significant time, or will you have budget for new tools and/or outside assistance with setting up a new analytics system, in either this or your next fiscal year?

Yes, we can arrange some balance of time/money for analytics

No, we can't foreseeably afford to support a migration project

What are your goals for your analytics capability?(Required)

You are setting the foundation for your website analytics for the long term, so looking down the road, what do you reasonably hope to do with your analytics capability?

Maintain our current capabilities, or use current data better through strategy & adoption

Grow data capabilities, with data collection and reporting better than they were

Do you have the ability to do "analysis"(Required)

This means asking questions, and looking at data within your analytics tools to try to answer them, and share those answers with peers.

Yes, we have either the time & talent, or budget for this

No, we won't have access to the skills for this

Do you have the ability to build dashboards?(Required)

Aside from using existing reports within an analytics tool, do you have access to the skills (on staff or through contractors) to connect and configure new curated outputs for your data, possibly across multiple tools?

Yes, we should be able to handle custom reporting

No, we will need to rely on our tool's default reports

And will you be able to build custom data pipelines?(Required)

If data needs to be customized and cleaned, do you have access to the talent (whether on staff or through contractors) to build custom data pipelines both into your analytics tool (data collection) & out of your analytics tool (reporting)? This may include through configuration or through code in tools like Google Tag Manager, BigQuery, and the more advanced features of Google Data Studio.

Yes, we can permanently tailor data flows to our needs

No, we'll need relevant and easy to interpret data out of the box

Are you generally satisfied with GA3?(Required)

Do you have a team that is familiar with the legacy version of Google Analytics ("version 3" or "Universal Analytics"), meaning that you feel comfortable exploring its reports and found that the data it has provided suits common analytics needs?

Yes, GA3 has served us well and we would like something similar

No, GA3 was falling short of our needs and we wish for something different

What have you felt was missing from your GA capabilities?(Required)

With many possible options out there for what analytics tool you might use, and how you would set it up for your organization, it's important to think specifically about what you wish your analytics tool could do for you as you evaluate today's recommendation and any other tool you may consider. Which of the following stands out as a top priority for your next system?

Reports tailored specifically to publications and authors

Easier to read/see/interpret user experience insights

The ability to explore data directly within the admin screens of our website

All-in-one solutions with flexible and attractive dashboards

Website data that easily maps to user records in our CRM

You should consider...

Based on your answers to these questions, consider the following approach to handling your analytics in the future. While this is not the only solution that would work for your organization, you can use it as a default decision and a starting place for internal deliberation to validate what you might gain, what you might lose, and what your team is willing to invest in the future of your data strategy.

No website analytics

If your organization is not able to support any analytics solution, either by purchasing and setting up the software, or by spending time to leverage the data in the long term, the most honest (and provocative) solution may be to remove analytics entirely from the website. If you do nothing, this will happen by default when GA3 expires in Summer 2023.

Having analytics in-place, or a system that is ill-configured to your needs, may offer some comfort and "tick the box", but it misrepresents your organization's ability to actually leverage website data strategically. By proactively declaring that your organization is choosing to have no solution, you will force your colleagues to reckon with its inability to use data, and perhaps spark the conversation that leads your team (and its funders) to support a solution in the future.

This is a scorched earth approach to the retirement of Universal Analytics that will leave you with no data at all after July 2023, until your organization puts a new solution in place, hopefully making this a temporary strategy. Moreover, broadcasting this as your solution can cause internal conflict and force you to simply say "no" if colleagues ask questions about website performance. Do not go this route lightly.

Out-of-the-box Google Analytics 4

Given your organization's limited ability to setup analytics, and perhaps even to use it over the long run, the path of least resistance will be for you to simply setup the new Google Analytics 4, despite the steep limitations of using that tool on its own.

The process of creating an account and installing the code for GA4 is straightforward and will be familiar to any Google Analytics veteran. Your web vendor, IT team, or even technical staff in other departments should be able to help. And moreover, with so many organizations moving to GA4, being on this platform will give you the opportunity to learn from the community and gradually catch up with improvements over the long-term.

In the meantime, however, be prepared for significantly reduced baseline capability, as GA4 without investing in supporting infrastructure lacks many of the familiar conveniences that made GA3 a standard for the sector. Aside from being able to provide the simplest top line metrics (e.g. total traffic trends, top 10 URLs), you may find it difficult to answer even the simplest follow-up questions (e.g. what made a particular publication successful?). Be conscious of these limitations, and be clear with peers and leadership that using website data will be more difficult in the future.

Matomo

Your organization is a strong candidate for Matomo, a long-running, open-source analytics platform that was designed as a comparable alternative to Google Analytics.

Matomo has grown significantly over the years and while it is set up to make it very easy and intuitive for GA3 users, it has actually exceeded GA in key ways, responding to criticisms that Google ignored, and heading off common mistakes GA analysts tend to make. Moreover, they went beyond GA's basics to offer plugins for advanced capabilities, like heatmaps and user session recording. All of this with the same capability to customize and extend your data with its built-in tag management tool, akin to Google Tag Manager. And last but not least, Matomo has taken privacy seriously from the start, giving both you and your users control of your data in ways that allowed Matomo to sidestep many of the regulatory challenges that are plaguing Google Analytics right now.

This power and flexibility is not without some cost. There is a monthly fee for a hosted solution, and even the free "on-premise" configuration will require significant technical know-how to setup. Along the way, you will also face decisions about whether to prioritize Matomo's standalone interface or to focus your team on reviewing data through Matomo's CMS plugins.

Still, the overall effort to get Matomo producing valuable insights should be markedly less than achieving the same with Google Analytics 4 because the out-of-the-box defaults for Matomo are powerful and will be familiar and easy-to-interpret for anyone who has worked on analytics in the past.

Mixpanel

While there are many tools with good reporting out there, Mixpanel stands out for its long heritage, simple-yet-flexible dashboards, and free tier for lower traffic websites.

Mixpanel offers an improvement over Google Analytics because of several features designed not just to manage your data, but to manage the way your team interacts with that data. Flow reports help organize data around particular experiences, dashboards help you curate data, and built-in alerts and dictionaries help your team notice and interpret key data events.

Mixpanel is a product-centric tool that may or may not feel like a cultural fit for mission-driven and content consumption-based engagement, and the limitations of its free version are certainly designed to pull you into paid tiers, but these may be worth the trade off for the polish and ease of use, combined with the support you get from a company that was built around its analytics product.

Parse.ly

If your organization is an avid publisher, and the most important use for your website analytics is to study the performance of individual pieces of content and your authors, consider Parse.ly content analytics.

Parse.ly was developed specifically with publishers in mind and has an intuitive interface for content and editorial teams to explore and understand how their content commands audience attention. With some options to customize data, this is a great option for organizations that want to focus analytics on this specific use case.

This high level of support for publishing analytics needs comes at a cost, as Parse.ly's monthly fees are not insignificant. This cost is balanced, however, by the ease of getting the tool setup and underway. Parse.ly is less flexible and extensible than other tools, and that is precisely what makes it easy to own and administer!

Check your CRM!

If the most important thing to know about your website is how high-value audience members are using it, check the documentation (or reach out to your account representative) for your CRM.

Many CRMs have at least a limited ability to collect data from your CMS (website) even if only to track user-specific activities. This can appear on a "timeline" for individual contacts, or allow you to segment messages to users that have (or have not) viewed specific content, allowing you to send tailored content like event reminders.

While some CRMs can offer top-level information about your web traffic overall, many will leave you with limited insights about content and traffic trends as they are only designed to help you engage your existing audience with more nuance.

However...

If your CRM's web analytics capabilities are too limited and you need a more fully featured website analytics platform, consider Matomo. Matomo offers great website data and reporting, while also giving you direct access to underlying data for long-term integration with your CRM. Know, however, that these kinds of custom integrations can be costly, so if you go that route, plan (and budget) ahead for a significant project.

Google Analytics 4 + ecosystem setup

Your organization is well positioned to take advantage of GA4 and all of its flexibility and power, despite the significant effort it may require to get up and running.

GA4 can be tailored extensively to match your data strategy requirements. Using Google's own suite of supporting systems (e.g. Google Tag Manager, BigQuery, and Google Data Studio) or subbing in your own data management and reporting tools (e.g. data lake, Tableau, PowerBI) will allow you to make GA4 your own.

And perhaps most comfortingly, you will be traveling with the herd as a huge number of organizations will join you in this transition, and a global talent pool is already priming itself to innovate and support your needs.

Setting up GA4, and getting it to produce valuable insights will take significant work, however, so set internal expectations accordingly. Be prepared to spend hundreds of hours, or tens of thousands in contractor costs to fully set up not just GA4, but the ecosystem of tools around it that are needed to make it fully functional.

Final recommendation...

How confident do you feel in your answers leading up to this decision?

As we make our recommendation, it's important to consider how confident you are about your requirements, and what uncertainties you still have to address to enable you to act.

Not confident

Uncomfortable

Unsure

Comfortable

Confident

On what timeframe do you hope to have a solution in place

There are competing time pressures for replacing legacy analytics: It will take weeks or to put a new solution in place, or even months for more robust analytics setups. Meanwhile, putting a new system in place soon means you'll have at least some historical data when GA3 expires (for year over year comparisons, orgs need to launch a new solution in June 2022). When do you hope to deploy your solution?

Decision toolkit

This exercise is the last step of our toolkit addressing the expiration of Google Analytics’ Universal. Access all resources in our GA decision toolkit series or jump to a particular resource.

Webinar: Are you prepared for the Google Analytics 4 transition?
Worksheet: Website data strategy inventory
Video: Broader data strategy self-assessment exercise
Blog post: Is Google Analytics 4 right for your organization?
Worksheet: Analytics decision-making tool (You are here)
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