Thoughts on web analytics, privacy, and building a Google Analytics alternative. From the founder of Clickport.
The only guide that covers 50+ European tools across 10 categories with real pricing, honest trade-offs, and migration difficulty ratings. Built from firsthand experience running a business on a fully European stack.
Continue reading →Austria was the first EU country to rule Google Analytics illegal. Unlike France, there is no consent exemption for analytics cookies. 34% of Austrian websites dropped GA after the ruling. Here's the full picture for 2026.
Continue reading →Shopify's built-in analytics miss 30-50% of EU visitors, attribute 40% of traffic as 'Direct,' and lock custom reports behind a $399/month plan. Here's what store owners need to know, and what better data actually looks like.
Continue reading →CNIL has issued over 1 billion euros in cookie fines since 2020. Fewer than 25% of French visitors accept analytics cookies. And there's a consent exemption most French websites don't know about. Here's the full picture for 2026.
Continue reading →A growing industry sells AI visibility scores built on synthetic prompts, panel estimates, and proprietary formulas. SparkToro found less than a 1% chance AI gives the same brand list twice. Here's why these scores buy you nothing, and what to measure instead.
Continue reading →53% of visitors bounce after a single page. Average engaged time: 28 seconds. Pageviews tell you someone arrived. Engagement data tells you whether you answered their question. Here's how to measure what actually matters.
Continue reading →The EU is rewriting the cookie rules. A new consent exemption for analytics could eliminate cookie banners for qualifying tools. Google Analytics doesn't qualify. Here's everything you need to know about Article 88a and what it means for your website.
Continue reading →Google Analytics is illegal in 8 European countries, classified as a wiretap in California, blocked by a quarter of all browsers, and costs $5,000 to $18,000 in hidden expenses. Here's every data point I could find.
Continue reading →Seven EU countries have ruled Google Analytics illegal. 2,341 US wiretapping lawsuits have been filed. The legal bridge keeping GA4 alive in Europe is cracking. And Google just turned your analytics into an AI advertising tool. Here's the full picture for 2026.
Continue reading →2,341 lawsuits filed. $5,000 per violation. No proof of actual harm required. A 1967 phone-tapping law is now the biggest legal threat to anyone running Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or a chatbot on their website. Here's what you need to know.
Continue reading →75% of SEOs are unhappy with GA4. But every comparison article tells you to switch without admitting what you lose. This is the honest version: where GA4 wins, where it fails, what it actually costs, and why I built an alternative.
Continue reading →Matomo is the most respected open-source analytics project in the world. I considered using it. Then I looked at the MySQL archiving cron job, the 12-step GDPR configuration, and the 217 WordPress database tables. This is the story of what I found.
Continue reading →The UK's privacy regulator lost 90.8% of its tracked traffic after implementing a proper consent banner. That's the system working as intended. Here's what actually changes when your analytics don't need a cookie banner: from data accuracy and page speed to mobile UX, legal risk, and visitor trust.
Continue reading →GA4's form tracking is its weakest feature. It misses AJAX forms, can't tell your forms apart, and loses 50-70% of EU data to consent banners. Here's how to track every form submission with zero configuration, no cookies, and no Tag Manager.
Continue reading →Bounce rate is the most misunderstood metric in web analytics. Three different tools will give you three different numbers for the same traffic. Here's everything you need to know: how it's calculated, what the benchmarks actually are, whether it affects SEO, and why your bounce rate is probably wrong.
Continue reading →60-70% of European visitors reject analytics cookies. That means your Google Analytics data is a fraction of reality. Here's the complete guide to privacy-friendly analytics: how cookieless tracking works, what the legal landscape looks like in 2026, and how to switch.
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