Plausible: Simple web analytics tool you can use to measure site traffic
Most analytics tools give you more data than you need and make it hard to find what matters. Plausible takes a different approach: one page, the metrics that count, no setup required. Here’s a closer look.
- What are web analytics?
- Google Analytics is a complex tool that requires education
- Plausible is a simple web analytics tool
- More ways Plausible keeps things simple
- Give Plausible a chance with a 30-day free trial
What are web analytics?
Web analytics is the process of measuring and analyzing the usage of a website. Website owners use the analytics data to assess the performance of a site, to figure out what they’re doing well and what not so well and to see what they can do to improve and optimize their future efforts.
Google Analytics is a complex tool that requires education
Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool. It is installed on and is tracking website traffic on 85% of all websites that use known web analytics tools. Google Analytics is widely spread but it is far from being an easy and simple site analytics tool to use.
When you open your Google Analytics, you’re welcomed with a very busy page full of analytics metrics. On the navigational menu on the left-hand side, you have ten different sections. Opening each of these ten menu items, we can count more than 40 sub-sections.
More than 20 of these sub-sections have additional menu items within them. The total count of these additional menu items is at more than 85 reports.
So in total, Google Analytics on the left-hand side navigation menu has more than 125 items for different reports you can gather your insights from. All these different reports track more than 290 different metrics combined.
That’s a full-time job which requires a lot of time, effort, expertise and experience to do well. Many Google Analytics users end up needing to create their own custom dashboards where they add different widgets with useful metrics that they actually get value from.
Then they ignore everything else that Google Analytics tracks. Many just ignore it completely as it’s overwhelming to even start with.
Google Analytics is a powerful but complex web analytics tool that takes time to understand, requires training and education. It collects way too many data points and most people find real and regular use for only a fraction of the data it measures.
It is a maximalist and overkill solution for most website owners. This is what made us build Plausible and why we believe Plausible is a great Google Analytics alternative.
Plausible is a simple web analytics tool
Plausible cuts through all that noise that Google Analytics creates. Plausible is simpler to use as it tracks a smaller number of metrics and presents them on a cleaner dashboard.
Rather than tracking every metric imaginable, many of them that you will never find a use for, Plausible focuses on the most essential website stats only.
There is no navigational menu. There are no additional sub-menus. There is no need to create custom reports. We provide you with a simple and useful web analytics dashboard out of the box.
It is easy to use and understand with no training or prior experience. One page shows you everything: unique visitors, pageviews, referral sources, top pages, countries, devices, and goals. You can filter by any dimension, compare time periods, and track conversions and revenue. No custom reports, no digging through menus.
More ways Plausible keeps things simple
1. Lightweight script that doesn’t slow down your site
Analytics scripts have a performance impact on the page weight and the loading time speed of a website. Plausible aims to provide you with all the essential website traffic insights without a negative impact on your site speed.
Our analytics script is 75 times smaller than the Google Analytics script. It is lighter and faster to load so you will reduce the page weight of your site compared to when using Google Analytics.
2. Web analytics without the use of cookies and other privacy-invasive tools
Plausible doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t track nor collect any personal data. This means that Plausible provides you web analytics compliant with the cookie law and privacy regulations out of the box.
There is no need for you to have a complex privacy policy because of the Plausible analytics, collection of personal data or cookies.
3. You can keep your website experience simple and visitor-friendly
Plausible is built as a privacy-first web analytics tool. By using Plausible, you don’t need to compromise the user experience of your website. You don’t need to have any prompts to obtain consent for GDPR, CCPA or PECR.
You don’t need to show any cookie banners either. You can focus on creating a pure web experience instead and your visitors can enjoy your site without any annoyances and distractions.
4. Simple to set up and integrate into your website
Plausible is simple to set up and integrate into your website no matter which CMS you use or how you’ve built your site. You simply insert our one-line JavaScript snippet into the <head> section of the pages you’d like to keep an eye on and the numbers will start rolling in.
5. Much easier to get business insights as compared to Google Analytics 4
Fetching most of even basic business insights from GA4 requires going through multiple different standard reports while editing them, using Explorations to build custom tables from scratch, or using a combination of both depending upon the use case. There’s no exact one-stop overview with simple metrics.
For example, there’s a straightforward Exit Pages report available in the Plausible dashboard. But you would need to build a full-fledged custom report (“Explorations”) from scratch in Google Analytics to learn the same insight.
Similarly, you would need to build a custom report with multiple complex dimensions and metrics to learn how many conversions were acquired from which source, page, city, device, etc., all on one page. Again, this is as easy as applying a few filters in Plausible’s dashboard.
We cover all these instances where Plausible is easier to use than GA4 in this comparison.
Give Plausible a chance with a 30-day free trial
Plausible is a simple, open-source and privacy-friendly site analytics tool. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial and explore our GDPR, CCPA and PECR compliant simple web analytics dashboard. You don’t need to remove your current analytics provider either until you’ve tested Plausible and figured out if you like our product.
