After some billing problems with Statcounter I was looking around for an alternative and discovered Matomo (formerly known as Piwik). This is a really impressive program and I have just spent the last week setting this up for my clients and exploring it. So, if anyone is looking for a more ethical and Google-free way to collect analytics I can recommend https://matomo.org/. There are two options:
- Matomo Cloud which is a subscription service (and way too expensive for me).
- Matomo On-Premise which is a self-hosted (free) open source version.
They also have a couple of WordPress plugins. One is a complete Matomo installation (min WP 4.8), and the other is an integration plugin that integrates with your cloud or local version (min WP 5.0 but still seems to work with CP). They are not interested in working with ClassicPress (I asked).
I am using the self-hosted program and didn’t bother with any plugins, just installed the small code snippet in functions.php. Clients have a login access to view their stats. I haven’t used Google Analytics in a while, so not sure how they compare, but there is plenty of information in there to study. It will do daily, weekly or monthly email reports that you can customise.
Worth a look if you haven’t seen it already and would like to break free of Google.