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• What is White Label Analytics ? Everything You Need to Know

  6 février 2024, par Erin

  Reports are a core part of a marketing agency’s offering. It’s how you build trust with clients by highlighting your efforts and demonstrating your results. 

  But all too often, those reports deliver a jarring and incohesive experience. The culprit ? The logos, colours and names of third-party brands your agency uses to deliver work and create the reports. 

  Luckily, there’s a way to make sure your reports elevate your agency’s stature ; not undermine it. 

  By white labelling your tools, you can deliver a clear and cohesive brand experience — one that strengthens the client relationship rather than diminishing it. 

  In this article, we explain what white label analytics tools are, why it’s important to white label your analytics solution and how you can do it using Matomo. 

  What is white label analytics ?

  White labelling is the process of redesigning a product or service using your company’s brand. The term comes from the act of putting a white label on a product that covers the original branding and allows the reseller to personalise the product.

  White label analytics, then, is a way to customise your analytics software with your agency’s logo and colours. When you white label your analytics, you ensure your reports, dashboards and interface provide a consistent and familiar user experience.

  

  The alternative is to provide your clients with an analytics report containing the logo and branding of your analytics software provider — whether that’s Google Analytics, Matomo, or another tool. 

  For some clients, it can create a confusing experience that takes attention away from your agency’s results.

  Why white label analytics is important

  There are plenty of reasons to white label your analytics tool, from improving your client’s experience to generating additional revenue. Here are four of the most important benefits to know :

  

  Improve the client experience

  You want your clients to have a seamless user experience with your agency’s brand, whether they visit your website, log into their client portal, or read one of your reports. 

  By white labelling your analytics platform, you can give your clients a visually appealing experience that stays in line with the rest of your branding and doesn’t leave them confused about who they are interacting with or which company is providing the service they pay for. 

  This is especially important if your agency uses other third-party tools like a client portal or productivity platform that also allows for custom branding. 

  Strengthen client relationships

  When you use white labelling to remove solution providers’ logos, you ensure your brand gets all of the credit for the hard work you’ve been doing. This can strengthen the agency-client relationship and reaffirm the importance of your agency. 

  But, white labelling allows you to tell a better story through your reports and increases the perceived value you offer. There are no other brands, logos, or names to confuse the narrative or detract from your key points — or to stop the client from understanding just how much value you provide. 

  Save time and increase productivity 

  White labelling your analytics platform can save your team a significant amount of time when creating client reports. 

  There’s no need to carefully screenshot graphs to add them to your own branded report. You can simply email clients a report using your white labelled analytics platform, assuring them of a seamlessly branded experience.

  The upshot is that your team can spend more time on billable work, improving the value they deliver to existing clients or opening up capacity to take on even more work. 

  Increase monetisation opportunities

  Whether you are an agency or consultant, white labelling an analytics solution gives you the opportunity to package and sell analytics as part of your own services. This can open up new revenue streams, help you to diversify your income, and reach a wider audience.

  The beauty of a white label offering is that there is no allusion to the company providing the underlying service.

  The most important elements of an analytics platform to white label 

  A white label analytics solution should offer a broad range of customisation options that range from surface-level branding to functional elements like tracking codes. 

  Below we take a look at the top components you should be able to customise with your chosen platform. 

  Logo and Favicon

  The logo is the first thing clients will see when they open up their analytics platform or look at your reports. It should make your services instantly recognisable, which is why it’s so jarring when clients read a report with another company’s brand slapped on every chart. 

  This should be the very first thing you change since it will be on almost every page and report your client views. Don’t stop there, however. If you send clients web-based reports, you’ll also want to change the platform’s favicon — the small logo you see next to your website in a browser. 

  Customising both your logo and favicon is easy with Matomo. 

  Just head to Administration, then General Settings and click Use a custom Logo under Brand settings.

  

  Upload your brand, click Save, and it will automatically populate your brand in place of the Matomo logo across the platform, just like in the image above.

  Brand name

  Most analytics platforms will mention their brand names repeatedly across the site, so it’s important to change these, too.

  Otherwise, you risk clients reading your analytics reports in detail or playing around with your platform’s settings and getting confused when another seemingly unrelated name keeps popping up. 

  Again, this is easily done with Matomo’s White Label plugin. 

  Head to Administration, then General Settings. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find WhiteLabel settings.

  Enter your brand or product name in the first box and click Save. 

  

  Just like your logo, this will replace every instance of Matomo’s brand name with your own.

  Brand colours

  Changing your analytics platform’s colours to match your own is almost as important as swapping out the logo. 

  Failure to do so could mean the charts and graphs you add to your client reports could cause confusion. 

  You can also use Matomo’s WhiteLabel settings to change the platform’s background and font colours. 

  Just enter a new header background and font colour using hexadecimal values.

  

  This change will also apply to automated email reports. 

  Custom tracking

  Tracking requests and links are an overlooked element of analytics when it comes to white labelling. Most people wouldn’t think twice about them, but they are an easy way for someone in the know to identify which platform you are using. 

  With Matomo’s White Label plugin, it’s possible to customise every request Matomo makes to your clients’ websites. 

  If left unbranded, tracking requests contain the following references : matomo.js and matomo.php. 

  By clicking the Whitelabel tracking endpoint box on the WhiteLabel settings page, those references will be replaced with js/tracker.js and js/tracker.php

  You’ll need to update your tracking code to reflect these changes, otherwise, requests will still contain Matomo branding. 

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  Links

  Finally, you’ll want to remove any links to any additional content offered by the analytics company. These are usually included to improve the user experience, but they are best removed if you are letting clients access your platform. 

  With Matomo, you can remove all links by clicking the relevant box in WhiteLabel settings. 

  You can also use the Show Marketplace only to Super Users checkbox to limit the visibility of Matomo’s Marketplace to everyone bar Super Users.

  Can you white label Google Analytics ?

  In a word : no. 

  Google Analytics might be the most popular analytics platform, but it comes up short if you want to customise its appearance. 

  This can be a particular problem for agencies that need to stand out from competitors offering the same generic reports. You can add more context, detail and graphs to your analytics reports, of course. But you’ll never be able to create completely custom, brand-cohesive reports using Google Analytics. 

  3 analytics platforms you can white label

  While you can’t white label Google Analytics, there are several web analytics providers that do offer a white labelling service. Here are three of the best :

  Matomo

  As you’ve already seen, Matomo is the ideal web analytics platform if you want to let your own brand shine through. Matomo lets you personalise the entire dashboard and all of your reports. That includes :

  • Adding your brand logo and favicon
  • Changing the font and background colours 
  • Removing third-party links
  • Tracking using custom URLs 
  • Develop your own custom theme

  Matomo offers a 21-day free trial (no credit card required). If you want to get remove the Matomo branding, you need the White Label plugin, which starts at just $179 per year after a free trial.

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  Clicky

  Clicky is a simple, privacy-focused web analytics platform with a white label offering. Like Matomo, you can add your logo and change the platform’s colours. 

  Clicky offers a seven-day free trial and charges a $99 setup fee, with prices starting from $49 and rising to $399. 

  Plausible 

  Plausible is another privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative that offers white labelling. The difference here is that it’s pretty complex to set up. 

  Rather than customising Plausible’s platform, for instance, you need to embed its dashboard into your own user interface. If you want to create your own custom dashboard, you’ll need to use an API. 

  Plausible offers a 30-day free trial.

  Leverage white label analytics today with Matomo

  Don’t put up with confusing unbranded clients a moment longer. White label your analytics platform so the next time you sit down to share insights with your clients, they’ll only see one brand : yours.

  Matomo makes it quick and easy to customise the look of your analytics platform and all of the reports you generate. If you already use Matomo, try the White Label plugin free for 30 days.

  If not, try Matomo with a free 21-day trial. No credit card required. 

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• How to Conduct a Customer Journey Analysis (Step-by-Step)

  9 mai 2024, par Erin

  Your customers are everything.

  Treat them right, and you can generate recurring revenue for years. Treat them wrong ; you’ll be spinning your wheels and dealing with churn.

  How do you give your customers the best experience possible so they want to stick around ?

  Improve their customer experience.

  How ?

  By conducting a customer journey analysis.

  When you know how your customers experience your business, you can improve it to meet and exceed customer expectations.

  In this guide, we’ll break down how the customer journey works and give you a step-by-step guide to conduct a thorough customer journey analysis so you can grow your brand.

  What is a customer journey analysis ?

  Every customer you’ve ever served went on a journey to find you.

  From the moment they first heard of you, to the point that they became a customer. 

  Everything in between is the customer journey.

  A customer journey analysis is how you track and analyse how your customers use different channels to interact with your brand.

  

  Analysing your customer journey involves identifying the customer’s different touchpoints with your business so you can understand how it impacts their experience. 

  This means looking at every moment they interacted with your brand before, during and after a sale to help you gain actionable insights into their experience and improve it to reach your business objectives.

  Your customers go through specific customer touchpoints you can track. By analysing this customer journey from a bird’s eye view, you can get a clear picture of the entire customer experience.

  4 benefits of customer journey analysis

  Before we dive into the different steps involved in a customer journey analysis, let’s talk about why it’s vital to analyse the customer journey.

  By regularly analysing your customer journey, you’ll be able to improve the entire customer experience with practical insights, allowing you to :

  Understand your customers better

  What’s one key trait all successful businesses have ?

  They understand their customers.

  By analysing your customer journey regularly, you’ll gain new insights into their wants, needs, desires and behaviours, allowing you to serve them better. These insights will show you what led them to buy a product (or not).

  For example, through conducting a customer journey analysis, a company might find out that customers who come from LinkedIn are more likely to buy than those coming from Facebook.

  Find flaws in your customer journey

  Nobody wants to hear they have flaws. But the reality is your customer journey likely has a few flaws you could improve.

  By conducting customer journey analysis consistently, you’ll be able to pinpoint precisely where you’re losing prospects along the way. 

  For example, you may discover you’re losing customers through Facebook Ads. Or you may find your email strategy isn’t as good as it used to be.

  But it’s not just about the channel. It could be a transition between two channels. For example, you may have great engagement on Instagram but are not converting them into email subscribers. The issue may be that your transition between the two channels has a leak.

  Or you may find that prospects using certain devices (i.e., mobile, tablet, desktop) have lower conversions. This might be due to design and formatting issues across different devices.

  By looking closely at your customer journey and the different customer touchpoints, you’ll see issues preventing prospects from turning into leads or customers from returning to buy again as loyal customers.

  Gain insights into how you can improve your brand

  Your customer journey analysis won’t leave you with a list of problems. Instead, you’ll have a list of opportunities.

  Since you’ll be able to better understand your customers and where they’re falling off the sales funnel, you’ll have new insights into how you can improve the experience and grow your brand.

  For example, maybe you notice that your visitors are getting stuck at one stage of the customer journey and you’re trying to find out why.

  So, you leverage Matomo’s heatmaps, sessions recordings and scroll depth to find out more.

  In the case below, we can see that Matomo’s scroll map is showing that only 65% of the visitors are reaching the main call to action (to write a review). 

  

  To try to push for higher conversions and get more reviews, we could consider moving that button higher up on the page, ideally above the fold.

  Rather than guessing what’s preventing conversions, you can use user behaviour analytics to “step in our user’s shoes” so you can optimise faster and with confidence.

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  Grow your revenue

  By taking charge of your customer journey, you can implement different strategies that will help you increase your reach, gain more prospects, convert more prospects into customers and turn regulars into loyal customers.

  Using customer journey analysis will help you optimise those different touchpoints to maximise the ROI of your channels and get the most out of each marketing activity you implement.

  7 steps to conduct a customer journey analysis

  Now that you know the importance of conducting a customer journey analysis regularly, let’s dive into how to implement an analysis.

  Here are the seven steps you can take to analyse the customer journey to improve your customer experience :

  

  1. Map out your customer journey

  Your first step to conducting an effective customer journey analysis is to map your entire customer journey.

  Customer journey mapping means looking at several factors :

  • Buying process
  • Customer actions
  • Buying emotions
  • Buying pain points
  • Solutions

  Once you have an overview of your customer journey maps, you’ll gain insights into your customers, their interests and how they interact with your brand. 

  After this, it’s time to dive into the touchpoints.

  2. Identify all the customer touchpoints 

  To improve your customer journey, you need to know every touchpoint a customer can (and does) make with your brand.

  This means taking note of every single channel and medium they use to communicate with your brand :

  • Website
  • Social media
  • Search engines (SEO)
  • Email marketing
  • Paid advertising
  • And more

  Essentially, anywhere you communicate and interact with your customers is fair game to analyse.

  If you want to analyse your entire sales funnel, you can try Matomo, a privacy-friendly web analytics tool. 

  You should make sure to split up your touchpoints into different customer journey stages :

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversion
  • Advocacy

  Then, it’s time to move on to how customers interact on these channels.

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  3. Measure how customers interact on each channel

  To understand the customer journey, you can’t just know where your customers interact with you. You end up learning how they’re interacting.

  This is only possible by measuring customer interactions.

  How ?

  By using a web analytics tool like Matomo.

  With Matomo, you can track every customer action on your website.

  This means anytime they :

  • Visit your website
  • View a web page
  • Click a link
  • Fill out a form
  • Purchase a product
  • View different media
  • And more

  You should analyse your engagement on your website, apps and other channels, like email and social media.

  4. Implement marketing attribution

  Now that you know where your customers are and how they interact, it’s time to analyse the effectiveness of each channel based on your conversion rates.

  Implementing marketing attribution (or multi-touch attribution) is a great way to do this.

  Attribution is how you determine which channels led to a conversion.

  While single-touch attribution models credit one channel for a conversion, marketing attribution gives credit to a few channels.

  For example, let’s say Bob is looking for a new bank. He sees an Instagram post and finds himself on HSBC’s website. After looking at a few web pages, he attends a webinar hosted by HSBC on financial planning and investment strategies. One week later, he gets an email from HSBC following up on the webinar. Then, he decides to sign up for HSBC’s online banking.

  Single touch attribution would attribute 100% of the conversion to email, which doesn’t show the whole picture. Marketing attribution would credit all channels : social media, website content, webinars and email.

  Matomo offers multiple attribution models. These models leverage different weighting factors, like time decay or linear, so that you can allocate credit to each touchpoint based on its impact.

  Matomo’s multi-touch attribution reports give you in-depth insights into how revenue is distributed across different channels. These detailed reports help you analyse each channel’s contribution to revenue generation so you can optimise the customer journey and improve business outcomes.

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  5. Use a funnels report to find where visitors are leaving

  Once you set up your marketing attribution, it’s time to analyse where visitors are falling off.

  You can leverage Matomo funnels to find out the conversion rate at each step of the journey on your website. Funnel reports can help you see exactly where visitors are falling through the cracks so you can increase conversions.

  6. Analyse why visitors aren’t converting

  Once you can see where visitors are leaving, you can start to understand why.

  For example, let’s say you analyse your funnels report in Matomo and see your landing page is experiencing the highest level of drop-offs.

  

  You can also use form analytics to find out why users aren’t converting on your landing pages – a crucial part of the customer journey.

  7. A/B test to improve the customer journey

  The final step to improve your customer journey is to conduct A/B tests. These are tests where you test one version of a landing page to see which one converts better, drives more traffic, or generates more revenue.

  For example, you could create two versions of a header on your website and drive 50% of your traffic to each version. Then, once you’ve got your winner, you can keep that as your new landing page.

  

  Using the data from your A/B tests, you can optimise your customer journey to help convert more prospects into customers.

  Use Matomo to improve your customer journey analysis

  Now that you understand why it’s important to conduct customer journey analysis regularly and how it works, it’s time to put this into practice.

  To improve the customer journey, you need to understand what’s happening at each stage of your funnel. 

  Matomo gives you insights into your customer journey so you can improve website performance and convert more visitors into customers.

  Used by over 1 million websites, Matomo is the leading privacy-friendly web analytics solution in the world. 

  Matomo provides you with accurate, unsampled data so you understand exactly what’s going on with your website performance.

  The best part ?

  It’s easy to use and is compliant with the strictest privacy regulations.

  Try Matomo free for 21-days and start Improving your customer journey. No credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

  
  

  Your email address
  

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  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  
  

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• Google Analytics Privacy Issues : Is It Really That Bad ?

  2 juin 2022, par Erin

  If you find yourself asking : “What’s the deal with Google Analytics privacy ?”, you probably have some second thoughts. 

  Your hunch is right. Google Analytics (GA) is a popular web analytics tool, but it’s far from being perfect when it comes to respecting users’ privacy. 

  This post helps you understand tremendous Google Analytics privacy concerns users, consumers and regulators expressed over the years.

  In this blog, we’ll cover :

  What Does Google Analytics Collect About Users ? 

  To understand Google Analytics privacy issues, you need to know how Google treats web users’ data. 

  By default, Google Analytics collects the following information : 

  • Session statistics — duration, page(s) viewed, etc. 
  • Referring website details — a link you came through or keyword used. 
  • Approximate geolocation — country, city. 
  • Browser and device information — mobile vs desktop, OS usage, etc. 

  Google obtains web analytics data about users via two means : an on-site Google Analytics tracking code and cookies.

  A cookie is a unique identifier (ID) assigned to each user visiting a web property. Each cookie stores two data items : unique user ID and website name. 

  With the help of cookies, web analytics solutions can recognise returning visitors and track their actions across the website(s).

  

  • First party cookies are generated by one website and collect user behaviour data from said website only. 
  • Third-party cookies are generated by a third-party website object (for example, an ad) and can track user behaviour data across multiple websites. 

  As it’s easy to imagine, third-party cookies are a goldmine for companies selling online ads. Essentially, they allow ad platforms to continue watching how the user navigates the web after clicking a certain link. 

  Yet, people have little clue as to which data they are sharing and how it is being used. Also, user consent to tracking across websites is only marginally guaranteed by existing Google Analytics controls. 

  Why Third-Party Cookie Data Collection By GA Is Problematic 

  Cookies can transmit personally identifiable information (PII) such as name, log in details, IP address, saved payment method and so on. Some of these details can end up with advertisers without consumers’ direct knowledge or consent.

  Regulatory frameworks such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) emerged as a response to uncontrolled user behaviour tracking.

  Under regulatory pressure, Big Tech companies had to adapt their data collection process.

  Apple was the first to implement by-default third-party blocking in the Safari browser. Then added a tracking consent mechanism for iPhone users starting from iOS 15.2 and later. 

  Google, too, said it would drop third-party cookie usage after The European Commission and UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched antitrust investigations into its activity. 

  To shake off the data watchdogs, Google released a Privacy Sandbox — a set of progressive tech, operational and compliance changes for ensuring greater consumer privacy. 

  Google’s biggest promise : deprecate third-party cookies usage for all web and mobile products. 

  Originally, Google promised to drop third-party cookies by 2022, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Google delayed cookie tracking depreciation for Chrome until the second half of 2023. 

  Why did they push back on this despite hefty fines from regulators ?

  Because online ads make Google a lot of money.

  In 2021, Alphabet Inc (parent company of Google), made $256.7 billion in revenue, of which $209.49 billion came from selling advertising. 

  Lax Google Analytics privacy enforcement — and its wide usage by website owners — help Google make those billions from collecting and selling user data. 

  How Google Uses Collected Google Analytics Data for Advertising 

  Over 28 million websites (or roughly 85% of the Internet) have Google Analytics tracking codes installed. 

  Even if one day we get a Google Analytics version without cookies, it still won’t address all the privacy concerns regulators and consumers have. 

  Over the years, Google has accumulated an extensive collection of user data. The company’s engineers used it to build state-of-the-art deep learning models, now employed to build advanced user profiles. 

  Deep learning is the process of training a machine to recognise data patterns. Then this “knowledge” is used to produce highly-accurate predictive insights. The more data you have for model training — the better its future accuracy will be. 

  Google has amassed huge deposits of data from its collection of products — GA, YouTube, Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps among others. Now they are using this data to build a third-party cookies-less alternative mechanism for modelling people’s preferences, habits, lifestyles, etc. 

  Their latest model is called Google Topics. 

  This comes only after Google’s failed attempt to replace cookie-based training with Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) model. But the solution wasn’t offering enough user transparency and user controls among other issues.

  

  Google Topics promises to limit the granularity of data advertisers get about users. 

  But it’s still a web user surveillance method. With Google Topics, the company will continue collecting user data via Chrome (and likely other Google products) — and share it with advertisers. 

  Because as we said before : Google is in the business of profiting off consumers’ data. 

  Two Major Ways Google Takes Advantage of Customer Data

  Every bit of data Google collects across its ecosystem of products can be used in two ways :

  • For ad targeting and personalisation 
  • To improve Google’s products 

  The latter also helps the former. 

  Advanced Ad Personalisation and Targeting

  GA provides the company with ample data on users’ 

  • Recent and frequent searches 
  • Location history
  • Visited websites
  • Used apps 
  • Videos and ads viewed 
  • Personal data like age or gender 

  The company’s privacy policy explicitly states that :
  

  

  Google also admits to using collected data to “measure the effectiveness of advertising” and “personalise content and ads you see on Google.” 

  But there are no further elaborations on how exactly customers’ data is used — and what you can do to prevent it from being shared with third parties. 

  In some cases, Google also “forgets” to inform users about its in-product tracking.

  Journalists from CNBC and The New York Times independently concluded that Google monitors users’ Gmail activity. In particular, the company scans your inbox for recent purchases, trips, flights and bills notifications. 

  While Google says that this information isn’t sold to advertisers (directly), they still may use the “saved information about your orders in other Google services”. 

  Once again, this means you have little control or knowledge of subsequent data usage. 

  Improving Product Usability 

  Google has many “arms” to collect different data points — from user’s search history to frequently-travelled physical routes. 

  They also reserve the right to use these insights for improving existing products. 

  Here’s what it means : by combining different types of data points obtained from various products, Google can pierce a detailed picture of a person’s life. Even if such user profile data is anonymised, it is still alarmingly accurate. 

  Douglas Schmidt, a computer science researcher at Vanderbilt University, well summarised the matter : 

  “[Google’s] business model is to collect as much data about you as possible and cross-correlate it so they can try to link your online persona with your offline persona. This tracking is just absolutely essential to their business. ‘Surveillance capitalism’ is a perfect phrase for it.”

  Google Data Collection Obsession Is Backed Into Its Business Model 

  OK, but Google offers some privacy controls to users ? Yes. Google only sees and uses the information you voluntarily enter or permit them to access. 

  But as the Washington Post correspondent points out :

  “[Big Tech] companies get to set all the rules, as long as they run those rules by consumers in convoluted terms of service that even those capable of decoding the legalistic language rarely bother to read. Other mechanisms for notice and consent, such as opt-outs and opt-ins, create similar problems. Control for the consumer is mostly an illusion.”

  Google openly claims to be “one of many ad networks that personalise ads based on your activity online”. 

  The wrinkle is that they have more data than all other advertising networks (arguably combined). This helps Google sell high-precision targeting and contextually personalised ads for billions of dollars annually.

  Given that Google has stakes in so many products — it’s really hard to de-Google your business and minimise tracking and data collection from the company.
  

  They are also creating a monopoly on data collection and ownership. This fact makes regulators concerned. The 2021 antitrust lawsuit from the European Commission says : 

  “The formal investigation will notably examine whether Google is distorting competition by restricting access by third parties to user data for advertising purposes on websites and apps while reserving such data for its own use.”

  In other words : By using consumer data to its unfair advantage, Google allegedly shuts off competition.

  But that’s not the only matter worrying regulators and consumers alike. Over the years, Google also received numerous other lawsuits for breaching people’s privacy, over and over again. 

  Here’s a timeline : 

  • 2019 : UK citizens issued a class action suit against Google for imposing cookies to override users’ privacy settings in the Safari browser. 
  • 2020 : US citizens pushed for a $5 billion class-action suit for tracking their activity through browsers set in “private” mode.
  • 2022 : Another class-action lawsuit in the US for deceptive privacy controls and unconsented location data tracking by Google mobile apps. 
  • 2022 : Google reached a $100 million class-action settlement for breaching Illinois biometrics privacy laws in Google Photos. 

  Separately, Google has a very complex history with GDPR compliance. 

  How Google Analytics Contributes to the Web Privacy Problem 

  Google Analytics is the key puzzle piece that supports Google’s data-driven business model. 

  If Google was to release a privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative, it’d lose access to valuable web users’ data and a big portion of digital ad revenues. 

  Remember : Google collects more data than it shares with web analytics users and advertisers. But they keep a lot of it for personal usage — and keep looking for ways to share this intel with advertisers (in a way that keeps regulators off their tail).

  For Google Analytics to become truly ethical and privacy-focused, Google would need to change their entire revenue model — which is something they are unlikely to do.

  Where does this leave Google Analytics users ? 

  In a slippery territory. By proxy, companies using GA are complicit with Google’s shady data collection and usage practice. They become part of the problem.

  In fact, Google Analytics usage opens a business to two types of risks : 

  • Reputational. 77% of global consumers say that transparency around how data is collected and used is important to them when interacting with different brands. That’s why data breaches and data misuse by brands lead to major public outrages on social media and boycotts in some cases. 
  • Legal. EU regulators are on a continuous crusade against Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as it is in breach of GDPR. French and Austrian watchdogs ruled the “service” illegal. Since Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant, it opens any business using it to lawsuits (which is already happening).

  But there’s a way out.

  Choose a Privacy-Friendly Google Analytics Alternative 

  Google Analytics is a popular web analytics service, but not the only one available. You have alternatives such as Matomo. 

  Our guiding principle is : respecting privacy.

  Unlike Google Analytics, we leave data ownership 100% in users’ hands. Matomo lets you implement privacy-centred controls for user data collection.

  Plus, you can self-host Matomo On-Premise or choose Matomo Cloud with data securely stored in the EU and in compliance with GDPR.

  The best part ? You can try our ethical alternative to Google Analytics for free. No credit card required ! Start your free 21-day trial now. 

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

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