I dropped Google Analytics. Here's what I actually lost.
I replaced GA with the analytics module I built into xVoid a month ago. Here's the honest list of what I lost, what I gained, and why I'm not going back.
I'd had Google Analytics on every site I built since about 2014. It was the default. You set up a website, you pasted the snippet, you pretended to look at it.
A month ago I pulled it off my Ghost site and replaced it with the analytics module I'd built into xVoid. Cookieless. Privacy-first. Hosted on the same infrastructure as the shop. I fully expected to miss things. I figured at some point I'd cave and slide the GA snippet back in.
Three weeks in, I haven't.
What I thought I'd lose
The audit I'd given GA on previous projects was always a nervous one. "What if I need this later?" I never did need it later. But the worry was that if I switched to a leaner tool, I'd lose the depth. Some specific report would suddenly matter and I wouldn't have it.
I made a list before I switched of the things I genuinely cared about:
- How many people are visiting the site, and is it going up
- Where they're coming from (search, social, direct, referral)
- What they're reading the most
- Whether the shop is converting and what that conversion rate is
- Which products are actually doing the work
Five things. That's the entire decision-set I make from analytics. Everything else is decoration.
What I actually lost
A real-time visitor counter that lied to me. GA shows you "active users" with a number based on a sliding window of arbitrary length and includes bots until you spend a Saturday afternoon configuring filters. xVoid's number is a clean count of unique sessions in the last 5 minutes that fired any event. I don't trust it more, exactly, but I trust what it represents.
A bounce rate that meant nothing. GA4's "engaged sessions" metric replaced bounce rate with something even harder to explain. I never used it. xVoid still shows bounce rate the old-fashioned way: percentage of sessions that left after a single pageview. It's a blunt number but it points the right direction.
The ability to see who's visiting from where in the world, with a coloured map. Lost that one. xVoid has a map too. Mine doesn't have country borders drawn in. I don't care.
The ability to A/B test. I didn't use it on Ghost anyway. If I needed it I'd use a dedicated tool that does it well, not the one bolted into my analytics dashboard.
The ability to retarget. This is the one Google would say I lost. I would say I gained the ability to look my readers in the eye when they ask if I'm tracking them.
What I gained
A page that loads in under a second. The xVoid embed is one HTTP request and a handful of lines of JavaScript. GA4's gtag bundle is, last I checked, 60+ kilobytes minified, and adds two more requests for the data layer.
Numbers I can read at 9am with a coffee. The xVoid analytics page shows me total revenue for the period, the orders behind it, average order value, conversion rate, and the seven products doing the most work. All on one screen. No loading spinners. No "data is still being processed" delays.
A peak window I can act on. There's a heatmap on the dashboard that shows visitor activity by day of week and hour of day. When I started the post I'm currently sat editing, I knew it would land best on a Thursday around 7pm UK time, because that's when the heatmap glows red. Last Tuesday I tried to send a newsletter at 11am and it underperformed. The heatmap had already told me 11am was a desert hour.
The ability to compare any custom date range against the period before it. I can pick April 1 to April 30 and see how it stacked against March 1 to March 31, on every metric. GA4 can do this. The picker is, charitably, a maze.
The privacy thing isn't really the point
Most of the "drop Google Analytics" posts you read online lead with privacy. GDPR, cookies, consent banners, all of that. It's true. xVoid analytics doesn't set cookies. It hashes the visitor's IP into a daily session ID and forgets that hash at midnight. There's no consent banner because there's nothing to consent to.
But the real reason I dropped GA isn't that it was creepy. It's that it was bad. Bad in the specific sense that the report I needed was always three clicks away from the report I was looking at, and the report I was looking at was three clicks away from the dashboard, and the dashboard was three clicks away from the URL bar. Every time I wanted to know how the shop was doing, I had to remember a whole topology of menu paths.
xVoid's analytics page is one click. I've memorised it because there's nothing to memorise.
Would I tell someone else to do this
If you run a Ghost site and you sell things on it, yes, drop GA. The xVoid analytics module is included in the $15 a month subscription. You don't need a second tool.
If you don't run xVoid, drop GA anyway. Plausible and Fathom both do this job well and don't try to upsell you ad attribution. The decision-set is the same five questions. The dashboard should answer them in under a second.
I haven't missed Google Analytics. I'd say I'm surprised but I'm not.