Analytics without Google Analytics:what hosts really need to know about their website

What the cookie banner swallows

Google Analytics stores cookies in your guests’ browsers and reads them back. In the EU you need the visitor’s consent for that, and the tool must not start before it. In Germany this is § 25 of the TDDDG, in Italy the cookie guidelines of the data protection authority, the Garante. Both go back to the same European rule.

How many people then agree was measured in 2022 by the analytics company etracker, across 275 German-language websites with around 500 million visits. Averaged over all banners, 41% agreed. With banners that make rejecting as easy as accepting, as data protection authorities require, it was only 17%. On phones consent was lower than on computers, 38% against 45%.

The problem is not just the smaller number. People who accept are not necessarily typical guests. Telling whether Instagram or Google brings more bookings from a fifth of your visits is hard, especially for a holiday rental with a few hundred visits a month.

Is Google Analytics even allowed?

With consent, yes. For a long time the argument was about something else: that the data goes to Google in the United States. In June 2022 the Italian Garante found that one Italian site’s use of Google Analytics broke the rules, because data such as the IP address went to the US without adequate protection. The operator was given 90 days to fix it.

Today Google Analytics is allowed with consent and a suitable privacy policy. Some uncertainty remains until the Court of Justice has ruled. For a small business, though, that is a side issue. The more important question is the one above: what use are numbers that show only a small share of your guests?

Four numbers that are enough for a holiday business

Google Analytics has hundreds of reports. A host needs very few of them. When I talk to businesses about their website, we nearly always end up at the same four questions.

Visits, not page views

A guest who looks at rooms, prices and directions makes three page views but only one visit. The visit is what counts for you. If the number climbs in March, people are planning their summer. If May brings fewer visits than last year, that is a reason to look more closely.

Where visits come from

Google Search, Google Maps, Booking.com, Instagram, a newsletter, a travel blog that linked to you. It gets interesting once you see which route also leads to bookings and not just to visits. So that Instagram and newsletters are recognised properly, add small tags to your links, the UTM parameters, for example ?utm_source=instagram.

Where guests drop out on the way to booking

This is the number you can do the most with. From the home page to the rooms, to the calendar, to the guest details, to the confirmation: at every step some people get lost. If most stop at the guest details, there may be too many required fields. If they already stop at the calendar, maybe prices only appear there and come as a surprise.

How many book directly

In the end, what counts is how many bookings come without a portal and how that share changes over the months. This number does not come from your analytics but from your booking system. It becomes really useful when the two are connected: this booking came through Google, that one through the newsletter. What that means in commission is covered in the article on Booking.com commission.

How analytics without cookies works

Analytics without cookies stores nothing in your guests’ browsers. Counting happens on the website’s server, where the page is delivered anyway. This is how we do it in the websites I build:

Because the random value changes every day, the same person gets a new code the next day. That is the price: someone who returns a week later is not recognised, and the data is no use for ads that follow visitors around Instagram later. For a holiday business that is usually a good trade.

The legal details differ between EU countries but end up in a similar place. In Germany, § 25 TDDDG requires consent for accessing the visitor’s device, which means setting or reading cookies. Data the browser sends with every request anyway is widely seen as falling outside that, as long as it only feeds your own statistics and is not combined with other providers’ data. In Italy, the Garante treats analytics cookies like technical cookies, which need no consent, if they produce only aggregate figures, the IP address is shortened and the data is not linked to anything else.

Ready-made alternatives to Google Analytics

You do not have to write any code for this. There are ready-made analytics tools without cookies. Plausible counts much like the method above, with a code that can no longer be traced after 24 hours, and keeps the data in the EU. Matomo can run on your own server and, with one checkbox, work entirely without cookies. Both count visits, pages and sources reliably.

What they lack is the link to your bookings. They know someone clicked “Book”, but not whether that turned into an €800 booking or a drop-out at the calendar. That is exactly why I build website, booking and analytics together: every booking is matched to its visit, and the dashboard shows which route pays off.

You can try it yourself in the demos. Make a test booking on the website of the made-up agriturismo and then look at it in the dashboard. The data there is made up, your own visits are real.

What you can do today

Even if you stay with Google Analytics, you can do quite a bit better:

• Read your numbers as a sample. If only one in three agrees, 300 visitors in Analytics may stand for 900 real ones.
• Check that your tracking really starts only after consent. If it loads before, you have a data protection problem.
• Add UTM parameters to the links on Instagram, in your newsletter and in your Google Business Profile, so you can tell the routes apart.
• With every direct booking, ask how the guest found you. A simple choice field in the booking form is enough.
• Set up Google Search Console. It shows which searches your site appears for and sets no cookies on your visitors.

To see what a dashboard without cookies looks like for a host, open the demo dashboard. If you have questions, just write to me. I reply myself, in English, German or Spanish.