Since our review last year, Plausible has been busy adding more useful and powerful features to its open-source analytics platform. Let’s have a look and see how it has improved.
While Plausible has been improving its platform to better serve its users with new features, nothing has changed with Google Analytics. In fact, things got even worse.
In July 2023, Google discontinued support for its Universal Analytics and forced all users to switch to its new and overcomplicated Google Analytics 4 system. And in July 2024, users will no longer have access to their old Universal Analytics properties and will lose all the data as well.
This was a frustrating experience for most users, to say the least. The new Google Analytics 4 is not only difficult to use but many users have noticed that it’s also slower compared to Universal Analytics.
As a result, even the most loyal Google Analytics users started looking for better alternatives. And that’s when we came across Plausible.
What Makes Plausible Better Than Google Analytics?
Plausible is an open-source analytics platform and it’s incredibly lightweight. The script Plausible uses is 45 times smaller than Google Analytics.
Unlike the new Google Analytics 4 dashboard, Plausible has a very simple and straightforward dashboard interface where you can read and understand site stats without having to take an online course.
Plausible is also privacy-friendly as it collects user data anonymously and it’s fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR privacy laws as the company and its servers are located in the EU. This also eliminates the need to show a cookie consent notification on your website.
Over the past few months, Plausible received a bunch of great new features as well.
New Visits Metrics
One of the most significant updates made to Plausible was the addition of two new metrics. These are “Total visits” and “Views per visit”. Total visits are similar to Sessions in Google Analytics and Views per visit are similar to page views per session.
These new metrics will make it much easier to understand the stats in a much simpler way.
Improved Bot Detection
Plausible has made significant improvements to its bot detection. It’s now able to filter out bot visits to show you only the most accurate website statistics.
Plausible is now capable of:
- Blocking traffic based on the User-Agent header
- Filtering out known referrer spam domains
- Blocking traffic originating from data centers
- Detecting and excluding unnatural traffic patterns
Filtering by Multiple Countries, Pages, and Sources
Seeing where your traffic comes from is now easier than ever with the new filtering options in Plausible.
From the dashboard, you can now filter stats by multiple countries, pages, sources, and more. It will surely come in handy for segmenting your audience as well as to group specific geographical regions.
Stats Comparisons
If you want to see how your website traffic has changed over a period of time, you can now compare the stats over time on Plausible.
This allows you to compare stats to a previous period. If you have stats imported from Google Analytics, you can even compare your current stats to those old stats as well.
Funnels & eCommerce Revenue Tracking
Plausible has also added a few advanced features for marketers and business users who want to track goals.
With the new Funnels tracking, you can keep track of the visitor journey and see how effective conversions are performing.
With Revenue Goals tracking, you can assign monetary values to custom events to track your eCommerce marketing revenue.
Custom Dimensions for Pageviews
Custom dimensions, one of the popular features of Google Analytics, are now also available in Plausible.
This new custom properties for pageviews feature allows you to attach custom properties to pageviews and it opens up a whole new set of possibilities, like:
- Filter content by the publication date, page type, ID, tag or category
- Filter visitors by login status or user role
- Filter visitors by the language they’re viewing your website in
- Filter visitors by how many prefer or use the dark mode
- Filter visitors by level completions or high score if you’re a game developer
- Filter by the segment that saw a particular variation of your site which is useful for A/B testing
Quick Access to Most-Used Sites
The My Sites page on the Plausible dashboard has also received several new improvements. If you have multiple sites, you can now pin your most used websites to have them featured at the top of the page.
You can also search for your sites to find them quicker and they include a graph for a quick traffic overview as well.
2-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is now a must-have feature in every online platform as it helps protect your accounts with an extra layer of security. Plausible has also implemented 2FA across the platform to all users.
Is This the Right Time to Switch to Plausible?
Plausible has an easy-to-use import tool that allows you to import all your stats from Google Analytics over to Plausible. If you want to save your Universal Analytics data while switching over to a better platform, now is the perfect time to join Plausible.
Just make sure to complete the import by July 1, 2024. After that, Google will delete all your UA data.
Even if you’re starting a brand new website, Plausible is a much better alternative to Google Analytics in many ways. And the premium price will be a worthy investment.
Plausible offers a free 30-day trial so you can test it out and see for yourself.
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