Are you getting a notification in your Google Analytics account asking you to move to their new platform? Google has officially announced that they’re retiring their Universal Analytics and moving to Google Analytics 4. If you’re facing a dilemma about whether it’s the right time to try out other analytics tools, keep reading this article.
What is Google Analytics 4?
Google Analytics 4 is the latest update to Google’s popular Universal Analytics platform. It helps you track the visitors on your website, their behavior, and other essential traffic-related benchmarks. You can utilize the data from the Universal Analytics dashboard to create better marketing and execution processes for your online businesses. Although Google Analytics 4 is a buzzing topic, it’s not a new update in their analytics product journey. In 2005, Google acquired Urchin Analytics and relaunched the platform by releasing a Classic version of Google Analytics. The next major update came in 2013, bringing Google’s current analytics platform to the web, Universal Analytics. With the new Google Analytics 4, you’ll experience a new look within the analytics dashboard and a changed navigation flow. Although it might take some time for you to get acquainted with the new analytics platform, it’s sure that all the new features will go into Google Analytics 4 only.
Challenges with Google Analytics 4
Indeed, switching from Universal Analytics to GA4 is not easy; it is the change that keeps technology evolving for a better future. And that’s why Google allowed enough time for users to learn its new platform. Despite this, the new Google Analytics 4 platform has many changes, making adoption more difficult. Here are some of the notable changes:
No Bounce rate: The new platform replaces the bounce rate with “Engaged Sessions.” It means Google wants you to focus more on the audience engagement rate compared to checking who left your website. Change in tracking model: You’ll see one of the important metrics – goals, is replaced by conversions. You’re provided with a toggle button to set the events as conversions. Skilled Reporting: With Google analytics 4, you get access to the analysis menu that helps you create your reports using different event tracking parameters. Although it’s an improved feature, you need experience handling and visualizing the collected data. Missing historical data: As of now, you don’t have access to your historical data in Google Analytics 4. It’s like starting again from scratch, but you’ll be able to access your previous six months’ data after July 1, 2023.
You might wonder, is it worth opting for Google Analytics 4 with all the above challenges? Do you have the option to try other analytics platforms apart from Google? Thankfully, the answer is yes! Clicky Analytics is the tool available in the market that you can consider as an alternative to Google Analytics 4. Now, let’s jump in to learn more about Clicky Analytics.
Introduction
Clicky Analytics is a free cloud-based analytics platform, an open-source alternative to Google Analytics. It offers real-time traffic data like the number of visitors, the number of clicks, events, organic searches, bounce rates, and almost everything you get in the Google Universal Analytics dashboard. Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise organization, you can easily embed Clicky Analytics code without slowing down your website. Besides, you don’t have to go through all the troubles you might encounter while moving to Google Analytics 4. For example, the inaccuracy in calculating sessions and page views because of missing historical data. While there are many other factors to consider Clicky over GA4, let’s take a look at some of the best features of Clicky to ease your decision.
Features
Some essential features that set Clicky ahead of Universal Analytics are heatmaps, split tests, video analytics, audio analytics, and detailed path analysis. Let’s overview each one in detail.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps show you where visitors are clicking on your website. That means you can remove the guesswork about whether visitors are clicking on your CTA. Once you know where exactly they’re clicking on the website, you can optimize your CTA’s and improve the conversion rate for your online business. Clicky makes it easy to view the heatmap for a page from the website itself. It’s a good feature because you don’t need to leave your website to determine customer behavior. Besides, you can also set the date range for heatmaps for tracking performance improvements after modifying your call to action.
Events
Events include tracking certain Javascript-related activities like opening a menu, clicking a link, following the outbound links, email subscriptions, and download buttons.
Path Analysis
Path analysis is a funnel builder similar to the conversion tracking funnel available in Universal Analytics. It allows you to create a sequence of steps visitors go through and track the customer’s journey at every funnel step. You can set up to 5 pages for building a funnel. This way, you can figure out which page is dropping off your customers and work on optimizing the pages.
Big Screen
This is an amazing feature to check all your website traffic stats in a single window frame. Clicky’s big screen gives you a real-time view of your favorite stats with a 1-minute refresh button. Some of the key parameters that you can check are:
Real-time visitors Goals Visitor actions Engagement time Bounce rate Tracked revenue Top pages Top searched terms
and many more.
Goals
If you use goals to track your conversion points, you can rely on Clicky because GA4 does not include goals. It’ll help you determine what’s working and how to pivot if the visitors are not engaged. Setting up a goal is easy in Clicky, and you can also set split testing for your pages. This way, you can try out different versions of the same page and settle on a page with the best results.
Third-Party Integrations
Being an open-source analytics platform, Clicky offers many supported integrations. You can easily integrate Clicky with popular content management systems like WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, Joomla, Drupal, and BigCommerce. Besides, you can also pair Clicky Analytics with other emerging tools like Smarty, GoDaddy website builder, A/B testing tools like Convert Experiences, and WHMCS, a web hosting automation platform.
Pricing
Clicky is available in free and paid pricing plans, and you can choose the one that suits your requirements. Once you register on Clicky, you get a 21-day trial window to explore all their premium services. For instance, you can track up to 3 websites and 1 Million daily page views from their paid plans for free during the trial period.
Free Plan
If you’re starting up with Clicky for the first time, you can try their free plan to track a single website with up to 3000 daily page views. With the free plan, you get access to all the basic features like an analytics dashboard, real-time data, widgets, individual visitor actions, content referrals, and more.
Pro Plan
If you run a private blogging network, you can opt for the Pro plan, where you can track up to 10 websites and up to 30,000 daily views by paying just $9.99 per month.
Pro Plus Plan
The Pro Plus plan includes all the premium features, allowing you to track up to 10 websites and 30,000 daily views. Besides, you also get access to Clicky’s exclusive features like Heatmaps and Uptime monitoring which help you get better insights into your customer’s experience.
Pro Platinum
There’s also a Pro Platinum plan where you get all the features offered by Clicky with an extended page views limit of 100,000 daily views. With this plan, you can track up to 30 websites by paying just $19.99 per month or a one-time $159.99 annual fee.
Custom Plan
Going with this plan name, you can contact Clicky’s account manager and request a customized website tracking plan matching your requirements.
Alternatives
Although Clicky is an excellent analytics tracking platform, here are some Clicky alternative tools that you can consider for tracking your traffic data.
Fathom
Fathom is a reliable analytics platform that does not compromise your data privacy. It’s a GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, PECR-compliant company that routes its traffic through European-owned infrastructure. Unlike Google, Fathom does not ask you for cookie notifications, so it does not store your data. Besides, it is faster than many analytics platforms available in the market and bypasses a majority of ad blocker scripts on different browsers. Getting started with Fathom is simple. Just like Clicky or Google Analytics, you need to embed a Javascript code on your website and check all the tracked traffic data on the Fathom analytics dashboard. Their base price starts at just $14 per month, allowing you to track up to 100,000 monthly page views.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is another data analytics tool used by leading companies like Uber, Rakuten, Expedia, and many more to track their data. Some of its features, like visualization reports and funnel steps, have helped Mixpanel become a choice of more than 7000 paying customers. Mixpanel uses event-based tracking, like new sales on a website or submitting a form, and collects all the customer’s behavior data. The product’s data integration and tracking solutions help you get better insights about your customers. You can use these insights to make better business decisions and retain your customers on your platform. Like Clicky, Mixpanel comes free with a limit of 100k monthly users. Within the free plan, you can access unlimited data history trackings and core data analytics reports like flows, funnels, and data insights and explore options. For advanced features like data modeling, group analytics, and data pipeline add-ons, you can subscribe to Mixpanel’s growth plan starts at $25/month.
Matomo
Matomo is one of the popular Clicky alternatives ensuring 100% data ownership and protecting your user’s privacy. It’s free, secure, and requires less manual configuration than Clicky Analytics. Matomo offers powerful features like heatmaps, session recordings, media analytics, and A/B testing that helps you understand your customer’s behavior and make correct business decisions. If you’re Matomo’s Cloud user and run a WordPress website, you can easily install their WP-Matomo plugin to get all the customer analytics insights into your WordPress dashboard. All the data gets stored on your server, giving you complete control of your data.
Final Words
Now you’re aware that Universal Analytics will be replaced by Google Analytics 4, what’s your plan? If you’re still facing this dilemma, don’t hurry! You’ve ample time to decide because Univeral Analytics will sunset on July 1, 2023. This article will help clear your dilemma of choosing Clicky over Google Analytics 4 and exploring other data analytics options available on the web. Next, you can check out Google Analytics alternatives.
