Google Analytics is the most popular analytics solution, used by millions of websites. Even though it’s an effective solution for external websites, Google Analytics is NOT a good choice for Intranet websites.

Here’s why:

Google Analytics Isn’t Designed for Intranets

Google Analytics is an advertising tracking platform, targeted towards marketers and advertisers.

This wasn’t always the case: early versions of Google Analytics were more Intranet-friendly. But as the product has grown, Google Analytics has become more advertising-focused.

Most of the new features released in the last few years are not relevant for Intranet websites, like Remarketing, AdWords linking improvements, and DoubleClick integration.

Tracking Can Be Blocked

If a Visitor blocks the tracking script or beacon, the Visitor doesn’t appear in your analytics reports.

This is a weakness for all analytics products that exclusively rely on JavaScript. JavaScript-based tracking can be blocked, and increasingly is.

It’s easy to block tracking – there are many ways to do it, with browser extensions, browser dev console rules, or firewall policies.

However…Visitors can’t hide from the access log.

Data Protection Regulations

GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, CDPA, PIPA…with each passing year, there are more acronyms and regulations.

Google Analytics stores its data in a global cloud environment. This becomes a problem when concepts like Data Sovereignty and Data Protection are enforced.

One of the best ways to avoid these regulations is to keep your data within your environment.

Site Errors

Like most SaaS analytics products, Google Analytics collects data with JavaScript page tags. Pages that load successfully are tracked, but pages that don’t load successfully can go unnoticed.

There are many reasons a page doesn’t load successfully, like broken links, bad redirects, and unauthorized content.

All this information is readily available in your web server access logs.

Web Analytics for Intranets: A Better Solution

If your business needs a secure web analytics solution for your Intranet, please consider Angelfish Software.

Angelfish is a self-hosted web analytics tool. Angelfish is feature-rich, fully supported, and shows you data you won’t see in Google Analytics.

Learn More: Angelfish Overview