We’re long-time users of Google Analytics and Jetpack Stats, and we haven’t used other analytics in a few years. There is a new analytics plugin for WordPress, though, which seems as though it might be a real winner. We’re going to compare it with GA and Jetpack in this post, because those are the programs we know best.
We’re on the 7-day free trial at this point, so we have limited data, but we would encourage you to give it a try and let us know what you think.
AnalyticsWP
AnalyticsWP is a new-to-me plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce. It offers much the same data as Jetpack Stats, at a much better price — for us. Maybe not for you.
At the moment, we could pay once for the plugin and use it forever on all our sites for $199. That’s the equivalent of just a couple of sites for one year with Jetpack Stats. On the other hand, it is quite a bit more than Google Analytics, which is free. Jetpack Stats is also free for non-commercial sites and the price depends on traffic, so you might have a different set of numbers to work with.
Is it worth the price?
Quick glance data
This is the dashboard. It’s showing 7 days of traffic at one website, and will show more if you pay for the plugin and keep it running. our an quickly see the number of visitors, the page views, the views per person, and the number of people who came (during the past 7 days in this example) just once to a single page. AnalyticsWP calls these folks “window shoppers.” If they return, they will be upgraded from that status.
This line chart lets you see if you have a spike in traffic, a drop in traffic, or a sudden increase in engagement. It will also let you see if you have, never time, a nice rising angle like we all want to see.
Below the line graph there are bar charts for traffic sources (Google shows up as a “popular referrer”), the pages and posts that are bringing the most traffic, and the devices people are using. The grayed-out column will show countries of origin for traffic in the future.
I like to have a quick look every day to see what posts have been drawing the most visits. This helps me decide what to do with the day’s blogging and social media. I usually get this from Jetpack, so seeing the full week’s visits instead of just today or yesterday is a bit different. For some of our websites, the day’s news has a big effect on what pages people visit, so I think I would miss the immediacy of seeing hundreds of extra people going to that post about a new Supreme Court decision and so forth.
However, for a site with less traffic, a single day’s data is not that useful because the numbers are too small to be meaningful. A week is probably a useful starting point.
All this information is available at Google Analytics (though see more on this below), and a plugin like Monster Insights gives it to you in a dashboard in your website, too. AnalyticsWP and Jetpack both provide the information with a very quick glance, but GA gives a lot more information in addition.
Journeys
Here’s something different about AnalyticsWP. While 7 das with this website only showed us one identifiable individual, an e-commerce site would include all the customers who log in or make a purchase. Since we just had one identifiable person, we have very limited data here, but we went and had a look at that one.
You can see the individual journeys by going to your Users page in the WP admin area. Click on an individual — AnalyticsWP ads a “Journey” button to each — and you can see every page they visited, and when, plus their purchases.
That seems intrusive.
If I spend my coffee break browsing through books at your online bookstore, I’m not sure I want a human being to see every single book I looked at. Granted, Amazon’s bots know every book I look at there and make recommendations based on that, and I suppose humans could access that data if they wanted to. And admittedly, we have helped clients to see the patterns of behavior of visitors to their websites without seeing their names. But I can flat out look at all the pages Jane Doe visited, how long she spent there, and what she bought. It might be more comfortable if the website announced this somewhere.
On the other hand, AnalyticsWP claims to be GDPR-compliant and cooperative with consent tools. “Absolutely no data sharing: Data is never sent to our servers. We don’t even have servers,” they say at their website. This is higher level of privacy than that afforded by either Google Analytics or Jetpack Stats (and we have looked into that question thoroughly).
Accuracy
Since AnalyticsWP doesn’t rely on third-party cookies, it doesn’t get blocked. It doesn’t show bot traffic. The makers of AnalyticsWP say that this allows a higher level of accuracy. They also say that AnalyticsWP will show more visitors than Google Analytics. A head-to-had comparison did not demonstrate that for us. We saw slightly more traffic with GA than with AnalyticsWP. Since we had to use “Past 7 days” in both cases, we might be seeing that one gathers information a little faster than the other, or different definitions of “day.” Another possibility is that we might have more bot visits than we realized, and AnalyticsWP is filtering them out while GA is not.
The numbers were close enough for us to be satisfied with them.
Now, AnalyticsWP doesn’t give you all the data Google Analytics does. You won’t see the languages used to access your content, how many people download your files, how many people fill out forms or send an email, or a number of there things. You won’t get alerts about traffic and engagement spikes. You can’t explore the behavior of men from Australia or see which pages your Facebook visitors go to most often. There isn’t any way to analyze or to download reports. On the other hand, Google isn’t going to tell you what Jane Doe has been up to.
Bottom line
AnalyticsWP looks like a good alternative to Jetpack Stats, especially for those of us who are finding the new pricing hard to accept. It’s not an alternative to Google Analytics if you like Google Analytics — but it could be if looking at GA makes you feel like your head is going to explode. That’s a matter of personal taste.
We’re seriously considering using AnalyticsWP together with Google Analytics for clients who are not required to be HIPAA-compliant.
We’re interested in your opinions, too. Leave us a comment with your reactions and your experience if you’ve tried AnalyticsWP out.
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