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Google Analytics alternatives in 2026: an honest field guide
There are about six real options and they are not interchangeable. Sorted by the situation each one genuinely suits, including the case where staying on GA4 is right.
The GhostPane blog
Analytics without the surveillance
Practical writing on measuring a website honestly: consent and the law, cookieless measurement, migrating off Google Analytics, and getting numbers you can act on.
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How to build web analytics on Cloudflare Workers
Analytics is a write-heavy workload behind a read-heavy interface. On a free tier that constraint decides almost every design choice, including one that is not obvious.
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How many pageviews are your ad blockers hiding?
Published estimates range from 10% to 40%, which is another way of saying nobody's average applies to you. The gap is measurable on your own site, and the method is simpler than it sounds.
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Which AI crawlers are reading your site, and how to find out
GPTBot, ClaudeBot and a dozen others are fetching your pages right now. None run JavaScript, which is why your analytics shows none of it. Here is where the evidence actually lives.
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Do you need a cookie banner for analytics?
Consent law is triggered by storing something on a visitor's device, not by measuring traffic. Here is what that distinction actually means, and when analytics can run without a banner.
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Measuring content marketing without lying to yourself
Pageviews per article is the wrong unit. Content compounds over years and converts indirectly, and measuring it monthly guarantees the wrong conclusion.
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What self-hosted analytics actually costs to run on Cloudflare
A pageview-by-pageview breakdown of Workers, D1 and Durable Object usage — why the write pattern decides everything, and where the free tier finally runs out.
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UTM parameters that do not lie to you
Most UTM problems are not tagging mistakes, they are the absence of a convention. Four rules and a naming scheme fix nearly all of it.
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How long does GA4 actually keep your data?
Two months by default for the data that matters, and most properties were never changed from it. What expires, what survives, and how to keep the rest.