Remember browsing the internet back in the 90s when you’d have a little counter at the bottom of the page which proudly told you that you were the 1,687th visitor to that page? Or using log file analysers to monitor traffic, which very quickly became a way of tracking bots and other garbage?
Just me? Maybe I am getting old. I have been doing web marketing since before Google was founded and remember those heady days when search engines told you the exact search term when they sent you a visitor.
The Age of Analytics
Since 2005, the standard for monitoring visitors to your website has been Google Analytics. Currently on its fourth version, this doesn’t just tell you how many people viewed your home page, it tells you where they came from and what they did. Analytics quickly became invaluable to anyone who was trying to do business on the internet.
Why are Analytics so important for your business? Simply put, information is vital to get the best out of your website.
Who are your audience?
Where does your traffic come from? What are they looking for?Does your website serve that audience correctly?
Do visitors to your website take one look and then leave again? Do they pay attention to parts of your website that don’t actually sell what you offer?How effective is your marketing?
What did those hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of pounds you spent on advertising actually accomplish?
These are all questions that you’ve needed Analytics to answer for the past twenty years. From a simple breakdown of how many visitors came back to your website after their first visit, to monitoring which channels resulted in sales most effectively, trying to operate a business website without Analytics is crippling your ability to sell your products or services online.
Google won the fight to be the default option for this solution because they integrated their Analytics with their search data easily. Later, it became integrated with AdWords (now simply Google Ads) and Search Console. Most of all, nobody was able to challenge them because Google Analytics was free. It also meant Google was the recipient of huge amounts of information about everyone visiting almost any website on the planet.
The Privacy War
We’ve covered this previously. Since Analytics packages on websites became the norm, there have been people concerned about how much information is being collected about them. This has changed the landscape of web tracking, not just because Analytics providers such as Google and individual companies have to comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR, but also because public awareness has increased and failing to provide transparency about what you’re tracking can damage your reputation.
The two most notable impacts that this has had on businesses online are fundamental changes to how Analytics packages operate and the necessity to operate within the constraints of user consent. We covered user consent extensively when we talked about Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) in a recent post. Getting presumed consent isn’t enough any more, you need to be sure that your users not only positively say, “Yes, I agree to this,” but you need to be sure they understand what they’re agreeing to.
The change to Analytics has been caused by both the need to comply with privacy regulations (which have stiff fines, often specifically designed to hurt large tech companies hard) and the fact that these regulations are also impacting how people connect to the internet. The manufacturers of phones, tablets, PC, and any other device users can browse the internet with have to comply with these new privacy laws. As do people who make operating systems and browsers that are used on these devices. That means blocking some more primitive, although still commonly used, ways of tracking what a user is doing.
Web Analytics in 2025
Like it or not, the world we live in is the world we’re stuck with at the moment. Privacy laws are unlikely to go anywhere. Even if one national government rolls back privacy protections, the internet is a global marketplace, so we’re still bound by the rules in other jurisdictions. User awareness of privacy concerns is only going to increase. So we need to make sure that how we track users conforms to those two realities.
For businesses just trying to sell their products or services online, the solution is probably a lot easier than it is for big tech. You generally don’t need as much data about your users as Analytics has traditionally collected. Unlike Big Tech, you don’t have a user’s actions across hundreds, thousands, or even millions of websites using that data to paint a picture of them that is eerily invasive. You just want to know which of your paid advertising or maybe your SEO efforts resulted in someone making the change from a website visitor to an actual paying customer.
It is still possible to track users without violating their privacy, but it requires more than simply installing the Analytics tracking code. From the technical point of view, there are new requirements to fulfil in order to use almost any sort of user monitoring package. We’re on the cusp of losing access to third-party cookies, which will directly affect all sorts of tracking functionality. The last twelve months have already seen Consent Mode version 2 come out, meaning that Google’s Analytics now requires positive confirmation that the user has granted consent (something many feel was a long time overdue), which has resulted in a 30% to 70% drop in recorded traffic for some websites. Note that I used “recorded” traffic there. Those websites are probably getting just as many visitors every day as they were, but Analytics simply isn’t showing that.
There are also other analytics options out there on the market. Which is the right option for you does vary depending on your needs. From the technical implementation of the tracking package to integration with various marketing platforms, and most of all the price - picking the right analytics option is something that you can’t just resolve with a coin toss.
The most important thing you can do is to ensure that you build trust with your website visitors. This means being clear about what information you are collecting and what you are using it for. Going above and beyond the requirements set out in the privacy regulations to ensure that you are giving your users control over their own data can mean that those users are happy to tell you what you need to know.
The Cost
Sadly, between the technical side and the trust-building side, it’s likely that you won’t get the same amount of data about your website traffic without paying something. The days of Analytics being something that just happened for free are gone. While there are free options for all of the aspects that you’d need to pay attention to (CMP, the analytics package itself, and even the new first-party mode for Google Tag Manager), you aren’t going to get the same information as you previously had. Tracking blockers and the built-in privacy restrictions in GA4 will see to that.
While that might be fine, after all, you just need to know what is and isn’t working for you, but there’s a limit to how much information you can lose and still get a good picture of what is happening. As I mentioned earlier, some sites lost 70% of their Analytics data when Consent Mode v2 came out. For a small or medium business with a B2B or niche B2C market, that could be the difference between making sensible marketing decisions and making huge, costly mistakes.
There are solutions that will fix this and get you the best data available. But it differs from the traditional tracking solution in the key factor that it won’t be free. We’re aware of the fact that you still have a bottom line to watch, so you have to go for the most cost-effective solution for your needs. Speak to us, and we can talk you through the options for reversing the fog-of-marketing that many websites seem to have wandered into over the past year.
And no, the option is not going to be putting a 1990s-esque hit counter back on your website.
