Google Analytics is a bit wrong. Here's how I use it anyway.

Most small-business sites get Google Analytics bolted on by the developer, a cookie-banner plugin ticked “GDPR compliant”, and that is the end of the conversation. I do something slightly more considered: I run two kinds of analytics, because they are good at different things.

The problem with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is not as accurate as people assume. Safari and Firefox block a lot of its beacons by default, ad-blockers kill more, and a meaningful slice of any audience is simply never counted. For a news site living on read-time, that inaccuracy is fatal — I have rebuilt a publisher’s measurement from scratch precisely because GA’s numbers were fiction.

But here is the thing: GA is consistently wrong. It is like a bathroom scale that reads a couple of pounds heavy — useless for the exact figure, perfectly fine for whether the trend is up or down. If GA says traffic roughly doubled month on month, traffic really did roughly double, even if the absolute number is off. For most small businesses, that direction of travel is what actually matters.

What cookieless is for

Alongside it I set up cookieless measurement — either Cloudflare’s edge statistics for a basic count, or a custom solution that records to a private database. This is the honest number: it sees essentially every visitor because it does not depend on a script the browser might block, it sets no cookies, and it needs no consent to run. It is the figure I trust when I want the truth rather than the trend.

Why run both

Because they cover each other’s blind spots:

• Cookieless gives you an accurate, private, always-on baseline — the number you can actually rely on.
• Google Analytics gives you what it is genuinely good at: demographics, acquisition channels, audience insight, and a familiar dashboard — quick to stand up and quick to read, as long as you treat its figures as trends, not gospel.

One tells you how many. The other tells you who, and from where. Between them you get a picture neither manages on its own.

The consent part, done properly

Google Analytics sets cookies, so on my own site — and on the ones I build — it does not load until the visitor actually agrees. Accept, and it starts. Reject, and nothing is set — while the cookieless baseline quietly counts the visit either way, so you are never flying blind. That is a real choice, not a banner that drops the cookies the moment it is in the way of what someone came to read. The cookie policy spells out exactly what gets set, and how to change your mind later.

So that is the setup I reach for: the accurate number and the useful number, side by side, and a consent banner that means what it says.