Switching from Google Analytics to Plausible.

Roger Stringer
April 05, 2021
2 min read

I've been using Google Analytics for years but recently, I decided to try new tools.

My main goal was that I wanted to move onto a new Analytics tool that was faster and more private.

What I eventually ended up choosing was Plausible.  Plausible is a powerful yet simple analytics platform. The simplicity is what got me happy about it. I actually get to see all my data when visiting my dashboard. I can even see my goals at a glance.

Compare with Google Analytics, where there’s some digging to see most of my data. You can customize your dashboard on Google to display more of the information you want, but I hate having to carry this across all my different sites.

plausible1.png

Switching between sites is easy, and just a matter of a drop down.

The line of script you insert into your site is small, much nicer than using Google Analytics:

html
1<script async defer data-domain="domain.com"src="https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js"></script>
2
//

Goals are a big thing for me, and Plausible’s goal tracking is one of the platform’s nicer features:

plausible2.png

To track goals, you want to add an extra line to code:

html
1<script>
2window.plausible=window.plausible||function(){(window.plausible.q=window.plausible.q||[]).push(arguments)}
3</script>
4

For example, I use a custom event called 404, Then on the 404 page for this site, I add this snippet:

javascript
1window.plausible("404",{props: {path: document.location.pathname}});
2

That’s it, any page that hits 404 will now get stored as a custom event goal and let me see what pages they may be.

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