Why Loyal Guru switched to Plausible web analytics
At Loyal Guru, we’re all about constantly stepping up our game – and by 2022 it was high time to upgrade our website, keeping up with the growth of our platform’s capabilities.
That’s why our team worked on a new web concept, new layout, new content and new code, so enterprise retailers could confidently get to know and choose Loyal Guru to be their loyalty and personalization platform.
After a few months of hard work and dedication, by 2023 we were ready to launch the new site – and obviously wanted to keep a close eye on its performance.
Why we chose Plausible
Loyal Guru is a Barcelona-based SaaS startup that serves Enterprise Retail businesses across the globe, with a special focus on the European market. A big chunk of our website visitors are based in Europe, which is why we were committed to handle all personal data correctly.
Still, it’s important for us to have some data on how our website is performing, and optimize the content in order to best serve our audience.
Honestly, that meant discontinuing our use of Google Analytics because they track everything and are not fully GDPR compliant. That’s when we learned about Plausible and thought: “that sounds pretty damn amazing!”
Plausible is an EU-based, privacy focused website analytics company that doesn’t track users across websites or sell user data. There are many reasons to love the service, which is why we chose it over Google Analytics.
How we use Plausible
The marketing team at Loyal Guru holds a weekly optimization meeting, where we look at key website metrics. These are specific things we monitor closely:
- Website:
- Unique visitors, total visits, total page views, bounce rate, visit duration
- Landing page traffic
- Top pages
- Traffic sources
- Organic keywords, SERP ranking, backlinks and referring domains
We start by selecting the data range, and quickly have visibility through Plausible’s main dashboard of most of these metrics.
We then look at the more granular breakdown, starting with the top sources of websitors, and zooming into the search teams (keywords) that drive traffic to our site.
We have special interest in what pages (both product pages and blog posts) are performing best in terms of traffic. With Plausible we can quickly learn what are the most popular entry and exit pages, and better understand the website journeys. We like to see the cumulative performance on our different posts, cumulatively, over time.
These are other important metrics we monitor during our weekly review.
- Social media channels
- Total followers, new followers, number of posts, engagement metrics
- Communications
- Email newsletter: reach, open rate, click rate
- Workflows: unique contacts enrolled, engagement
- LinkedIN newsletter: nr of subscribers, impressions, engagement
- Conversions
- Conversion rates, submissions, new leads, qualified conversions
- Conversions per source, per topic, per asset
The 3 things we value most of Plausible
- Quick and simple to use, Plausible offers 80% of Google Analytics benefits with only 20% of the complexity. Most GA features are never used anyway – so it’s definitely a win. GA has dozens of reports and tracks hundreds of metrics, while we need 10 to 15 at most.
- Secure, encrypted data, hosted on a server in the EU, compliant with GDPR and other strict data privacy regulations.
- Lightweight script of less than 1 KB so sites load fast (Google Analytics is not!)
Conclusion
Plausible.io offers the perfect balance between giving us the information we need without compromising visitor privacy.
They’re really only presenting us the important and most actionable metrics, actually doing less than their competition. Still, that’s NOT a minus, but a plus: as a busy marketing team with important OKRs and strategies to execute, we do not want to get distracted or overloaded when looking at web analytics. We want a simple, clear and calm report, so we can continue doing our most important work.