Building a bigger haystack
Most websites have Google Analytics installed. Not because someone sat down and actually thought about what data needed to be collected, but because it was free, easy to install or pre-installed by the developers, and because of the power of the Google brand (“everyone uses it!”).
I'm not criticising, it just happens that way. I see it all the time.
A study from Humboldt University interviewed web analytics consultants who'd worked with hundreds of organisations1. What they found won't particularly surprise you: in every single case, Google Analytics had been chosen before anyone had defined what they actually needed from it. The brand did the selling, the price (or lack thereof) did the rest.
The problem is that Google Analytics is a genuinely complex tool, built for marketing teams with dedicated analysts or data scientists. If you don't have one of those handy (and I’m betting you don't), you end up clicking around a sprawling and overwhelming interface, vaguely hoping to stumble across something useful. Meanwhile GA is building a bigger haystack, collecting tons of data on your visitors that you’ll never even look at but are still legally responsible for.
The researchers found that's more or less what happens: people "play with" the data instead of learning anything from it. Some organisations even believed they were “data-driven” simply because GA was installed. The tool is running, so surely it's doing its job?
And there's something seductive about all those complex graphs, they make you feel like you're in control and they look good in a presentation. But GA doesn't think for you, It assumes you already know what to ask and how to configure it to answer. Most people don't, and that's totally reasonable, it's not their job.
Meanwhile, simpler tools exist: Plausible, Fathom, Swetrix, and many more that give you clean simple data: how many visitors, where they came from, what they looked at, how they left. That covers what most organisations actually need and, more importantly, would actually use.
They also don't need you to install cookie banners, because they don't track your visitors individually, meaning fewer legal headaches and no quietly feeding your users’ private data to an advertising network on the side.
You don't need less data. You probably need less tool.
Colin
[1]: Alby, T. (2023). "The Data Dilemma: Google Analytics' Untapped Potential and Web Data Literacy." LWDA 2023 (PDF).