Friendly Analytics is, as wordplay writes, a privacy-friendly and professional alternative to Google Analytics. It is the first, own product of the agency specialized in Google (SEO, SEA).
The Problem
Google Analytics is a good and popular analytics solution, but it has some disadvantages, especially in terms of privacy. In times of increasing regulation by laws such as DSGVO or CCPA (California), this poses challenges for many companies. This is something that agencies like wordplay in their everyday consulting work are often confronted with.
Many alternatives examined
Wordplay has therefore set out to find alternatives. There is already analytics offers that place value on privacy. However, these are very limited in their range of functions, such as Simple Analytics and Fathom Analytics. And: users cannot check whether the statements are true because the software is not available as source code. That’s why wordplay has focused on open source offerings.
The most popular open-source analytics solution worldwide is Matomo (formerly Piwik) – used by NASA, the EU Commission, and the United Nations. It offers professional features like target measurement including eCommerce tracking, multi-channel attribution, events, and a powerful tag manager. It can also be operated in a data protection-friendly way. However, it is not configured for this by default. In addition, hosting and secure operation of the software are very costly for many companies. And if problems arise, companies are on their own. Matomo also offers its own cloud service. From a data protection point of view, this is not really an alternative: the data is also stored in the official Matomo cloud at a US company – at Amazon’s AWS.
Friendly Analytics” solution
Friendly Analytics closes this gap. It is a version of Matomo that is configured for maximum data protection. From our point of view, the best protection for user data is not to store it at all. Friendly Analytics therefore completely avoids storing personally identifiable information (PII) and cookies. Thus Friendly Analytics is conforms to data protection laws like DSGVO (EU), CCPA (California), and PECR (UK). And even the annoying cookie banner is eliminated. Companies do not have to take care of installation or hosting themselves but can use Friendly Analytics as a software-as-a-service at a fair subscription price. The data is stored exclusively in Switzerland, never passed on, and not used for advertising purposes. All data can be completely downloaded or deleted at any time. Companies thus have 100% data ownership. The interface of Friendly Analytics is easy to use. Competent customer service with fast response times is available for all questions about the product at no additional cost.
By the way: The “Friendly” in the name naturally refers to product features. At the same time, “friendly” is one of our three corporate values at Wordspiel. You can discover the new tool here: friendly.is/analytics