Moving off Google Analytics

They will not, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something. Four real reasons:

Ad blockers. Every mainstream blocklist carries google-analytics.com, and on a developer-heavy audience that can be more than half your visits going uncounted. Our script is far less widely blocked, so we usually report more traffic than GA, not less.

Bounce rate means something different. GA4 redefined it as the inverse of engagement rate. It is not comparable to the single-interaction definition every other tool uses, including ours. Imported GA4 bounce rates stay labelled as GA4's.

Sampling and thresholding. GA4 samples large queries and withholds rows that could identify individuals. Those numbers are estimates before they reach us.

Unique visitors cannot be de-duplicated across days. The GA4 export is daily aggregates, so a 30-day total is a sum of daily figures and overcounts anyone who came back. We show imported uniques as a sum and say so.

GA4 buckets high-cardinality dimensions into a row literally called (other) once it hits an internal limit. That traffic is real but permanently unattributable — Google discarded the detail before we ever saw it. We import the row as-is rather than silently redistributing it, because inventing an attribution would be worse than admitting one is missing.

Yes, and we recommend it. Keep GA4 installed alongside us for 30 to 60 days. We will show you a day-by-day comparison of the two with the variance explained — which part is ad blocking, which is a metric definition, which is bot filtering. Not knowing whether the new numbers are true is what stops most people switching; a month of running both is how you find out.

Not for us. We set no cookies and store no IP addresses, so there is nothing on the visitor’s device to consent to under PECR or the ePrivacy Directive. If you remove Google Analytics entirely and have no other tracking, most sites can drop the banner — but that depends on everything else you run, so check with whoever advises you. We are not your lawyer.

Nothing, on every plan. There is no charge for the volume of history you bring, and no charge for us to run the migration for you — including recreating your goals and checking the result against GA4 before you rely on it.

The last 15 months. That is our retention window and it applies to imported history exactly as it applies to history you collect yourself — the importer will happily pull more, and anything older than the window is stored but not returned by the dashboard or the API.

That is a month longer than a standard GA4 property can be set to keep, so a like-for-like migration loses nothing — and if your GA4 property is still on the 2-month default, you are about to see considerably more history than you do today. If what you need is a multi-year comparison, say so before you migrate rather than after: we would rather lose the sale than have you find out in March.

1270 bytes gzipped against gtag.js at roughly 145 KB gzipped — about 117 times smaller, measured like for like on 6 September 2026. Exact bytes vary with your GA4 configuration.