A system for gathering visitor data and statistics.
The most commonly used analytics tool is Google Analytics. Google's analytics tools come in a few flavours, the modern "Google Analytics 4" and venerable "Universal Analytics".
Google's approach gathers lots of information, and will in most cases violate GDPR, requiring you to gain visitor consent before you can start tracking. It is also vulnerable to ad-blockers, as they may entirely block the code from running.
There are several GDPR and privacy friendly alternative tracking tools, like Plausible Analytics or Matomo.
We recommend using Plausible, and offer it as part of our AfterCare packages.
Plausible offers largely the same metrics as Universal Analytics, but can be made resilient to ad-blockers and other tracking blockers, due to it not gathering a single identifiable marker.
Tips:
- There's nothing preventing you from having more than one analytics tool.
- You can run both Google Analytics for advanced remarketing for visitors that have accepted your GDPR policy, and a friendly tracking script like Plausible to get a more accurate representation of total visitors.
- Tracking code can either be placed directly on your website via code or a SEO plugin, or injected via Google Tag Manager if you have that configured.
- Be sure to monitor your sites performance when enabling analytics, as it may adversely affect your sites performance if not properly configured.