Keith McCluskey

You own your data

I’ve used Google Analytics extensively in my career without giving it a second thought. It’s “free” (more on that in a minute), there are plentiful plugins that make it easy to install, and it’s got great visualizations that we are all used to. It’s become the leader in the space, driving the conversation around how web analytics “should work”, thanks to all of this.

But let’s dig into “free” for a second. There’s no monetary charge to use Google Analytics at the base level, but what are the hidden costs?

• I’m giving all my site data to Google, for free
• I’m giving all my visitor data to Google, for free and without their express approval
• I have to use a Google account to access the analytics, which means they also have access to that data
• In return, I get back an overview of the events on my site, but not the raw data itself

I can easily move through some predefined, high-level overviews of analytics by audience or acquisition, but digging down to a deeper level quickly runs into limits. Taking all of this into account, our CEO William often says “Google Analytics” isn’t really analytics at all.

You can get started easily

This is where our event capture solution differentiates itself. After you set it up (it’s easy), all your site data is yours forever. You can capture any event types you like and as many properties as you want. You can then easily query that data in near real-time from our reports interface, or the tool of your choice:

• Heartbeat events record activity at regular intervals, giving you a much clearer picture of specific sessions
• You can analyze any page visit down to the specific pixel, to see where users browsed and then stopped
• You can capture any event type you like, to see if users are clicking on specific types of content on specific pages
• You can track the source of every visit, to see if your social media ads are being served to the audience you want, adjusting as necessary

You control your tools

Google Analytics has been declared illegal in Austria for sending IP addresses and other identifying information to US-based servers. And third-party cookies are becoming more strictly regulated and in some cases prohibited. If you’re using Google Analytics in Austria, or if you rely on third-party cookies, you suddenly have to find an entirely new solution. With minusonedb, you have complete control over the information you capture.

• You can use your own cookies, or not
• You can capture user identities, or not
• You can capture IP addresses, or not
• You can easily track an entire user’s journey on your site through an anonymous session that doesn’t pass along any personal information

Each company will decide their own approach to managing these issues, but if and when you decide to move to more anonymized approaches we provide a powerful toolkit. With our solution, you can use statistical modeling to plan out your media mix and advertising spend. You can analyze your funnel from beginning to end. And you can track specific campaigns and tests at a granular level. As privacy concerns continue to come to the fore, individual attribution will become harder and less effective in terms of understanding your advertising. We believe that adopting models that are user-agnostic but still effective will become vital, and our event capture solution provides everything you need to do just that.

You can connect any data

Finally, our product is built to serve your needs. We help you explore all of your data to answer more questions more rapidly. As a data storage and analytics platform, we can offer more than other platforms that focus on one specific use case. Would you like to see all of the following in one place?

• Web event data, including heartbeats at regular intervals, along with:
• UTM and ABM data?
• CRM data?
• Log or monitoring data?
• User, product, or inventory data?

We can help you connect any (or all) of these. Our event capture solution goes further and is more flexible than anything else available. If you’d like to get started, let us know or start here.