While privacy-friendliness is one of our most important pillars, we shouldn't forget that we're also here for business owners that want to get insights to website traffic.
Our goal has always been to provide easy website analytics. Hence, we built a one-page dashboard that gives you all the insights you need.
- Why do you need website analytics?
- What insights should a website analytics tool provide?
- Google Analytics is a complex tool
- Simple Analytics is an easy analytics tool
- Which analytics tool should you choose?
Let's dive in!
Why do you need website analytics?
Analytics is essential for every business. The Insights it provides can help you navigate your business.
The purpose is to help you understand what you are doing right and what you need to improve. Understand how people interact with your site and gather this information to make informed business decisions.
However, at Simple Analytics, we don’t believe in violating the privacy of website visitors by tracking every individual user and collecting personal data.
What insights should a website analytics tool provide?
To use website analytics as a navigation tool, you must consider which metrics and KPIs are important to you. What insights would you like to see, and what data do you need?
The answer to this question will be very different for someone with a blog than for, let's say, a web analyst at a Fortune 500 company. However, almost every business uses the same analytics tool: Google Analytics.
Almost every organization plugs in Google Analytics without really thinking about what data they need and what criteria are important to them (and what they are signing up for when partnering with Google).
For some companies, Google Analytics fits like a glove. E-commerce websites that rely heavily on ads and user tracking will benefit from the power of Google Analytics. However, organizations conscious of their users' privacy or businesses that want to see the big picture in a simple, but straightforward dashboard, might not pair well with Google Analytics.
There is no one-size-fits-all, but still, everyone uses Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a complex tool
Google Analytics is the most powerful website analytics tool but also the most complex. It can be overwhelming for beginners, requiring training to grasp all its functionalities. If you have never used it before, you will find it hard to understand how it works.
When you login into your Google Analytics dashboard, you are welcomed by an overload of options and reports that you will most likely never even touch. Quite often, there is no need for multiple layers of menus and custom reports to give you the insights you need.
We believe you can get the insights you need without going through the horror of Google Analytics. That's why we built Simple Analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics.
Google Analytics dashboard vs. Simple Analytics dashboard
Simple Analytics is an easy analytics tool
Simple Analytics is built on two foundational beliefs. First, we believe in an open and independent web that is friendly to website visitors. Hence Simple Analytics is cookieless by design and does not track users or collect personal data. All our parameters are set up with that in mind, so you directly comply with GDPR, PECR & CCPA regulations. Secondly, we wanted to provide an easy analytics tool that gives you the data you need in a clean one-page dashboard.
You can see the page views and visitors from the dashboard and easily adjust your preferred timespan. In one overview, you can directly see how your website is performing.
Underneath the main visual, you can find your relevant parameters. On the left, you can see your referral sources ranked accordingly. It is also possible to overwrite these referral domains with URL parameters. With Simple Analytics, you can still you UTM-codes to evaluate specific sources.
The pages section covers the pages on which visitors land on your website. Using the magnifying glass, you can look for certain keywords to find information about specific pages. Everything is clickable, and by clicking on a particular page, the other parameters are segmented accordingly to that particular page. Here is what that looks like:
Mini websites as referral links
We also show referral links as mini-websites in our quest to make the cleanest dashboard possible. For example, if you want to view the traffic coming from Twitter, we show you the exact tweets responsible for the traffic. In Google Analytics and other web analytics tools, they will be displayed as a t.co link without any additional information.
Lightweight vs. Heavyweight
We focus on the essentials. We believe there is no need for multiple data layers and custom reports for you to make impactful decisions. As a result, the analytics script we run on your website is 15 times smaller than the Google Analytics script (3kb vs. 45kb).
Using our script has a positive effect on your page load speed. Or, if you put it differently, Google penalizes you for using Google Analytics. Adding scripts to your website impacts the performance of your website. The heavier the script, the longer the loading time of your website. Adding Google's script to your website negatively impacts your overall user experience due to increased load time and affects your ability to rank in search engines. Google Analytics is bad for SEO.
Export your data using our API
We don't share your data with third parties or transfer it overseas. The data is stored in the EU and stays there. The data is yours, and we believe you should use the data most effectively. With the Simple Analytics API, you can export your data via streaming. The data is directly transferred to your server or computer from our database. You can also export the data by selecting the fields you want and exporting the data into your dashboarding tools.
Simple Analytics export your data dashboard
Which analytics tool should you choose?
Google Analytics is the default analytics tool, but it might not be the optimal tool for everyone. There is no one-size-fits-all. If you need specific custom reports or rely heavily on tracking and don't care about privacythat much, Simple Analytics might not be the right tool for you.
Simple Analytics is the right tool for you if you:
...use analytics as a navigational tool and want to see the bigger picture
...want a simple dashboard with all the essentials metrics
...care about the privacy of your website visitors
...don't want to sell your data
...want to support the independent web
Who are we?
We are a small and independent team that cares about privacy. We believe that the web should be for everyone, and we are helping create a web that is friendly to website visitors. We are bootstrapped (meaning we are not funded) and are transparent about everything we do. We have an open roadmap that you also can contribute to.
This is how we try to make the internet a little bit safer for everyone.
Interested in coming along on our journey? Give us a try!