Why are visitor statistics important for associations?
Associations rarely focus their core activities online, but few would today deny the importance of a website. A website is often the first place where a potential member, participant, volunteer, or funder gets to know what the association does. Yet many associations collect no visitor statistics from their site at all.
Funders increasingly expect concrete figures on how widely the association reaches people. Website visitor statistics are one of the easiest ways to demonstrate this. They tell you, for example, how many people visit your site each month, where they come from, and which pages are the most popular. Does your association sell services or trainings? Visitor statistics also show how well your site guides visitors towards making contact.
Google Analytics is not the best solution for associations
Many associations have at some point installed — or tried to install — Google Analytics on their website, because it is free and the most well-known option. Despite being free and widely known, Google Analytics is not without its problems, especially for small associations.
The first challenge is GDPR, the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. GDPR applies to every organisation that processes personal data, regardless of size. Google Analytics uses cookies to collect visitor data. This means your site needs a cookie consent banner where visitors can accept or reject cookies before analytics starts collecting data. In practice, a large proportion of visitors reject cookies, which leaves your visitor statistics incomplete. If there is no cookie consent banner at all, your site is not GDPR-compliant.
The second challenge is complexity. The current version of Google Analytics (GA4) is designed primarily for large online services and e-commerce stores. Its interface is complex and contains many features that an association's administrator simply does not need. Getting a simple, quick answer to a question like "how many visitors did we have last month" often requires a great deal of navigation.
Google Analytics is, however, a powerful tool that serves large organisations well with complex analysis needs. For an association that simply wants to know how many visitors the site gets, it is an unnecessarily heavy and complex solution that also brings GDPR obligations with it.
The solution: privacy-focused analytics
There are analytics services designed from the ground up with privacy in mind. One of these is Plausible Analytics. Plausible is a European, open-source analytics service that uses no cookies and collects no personal data. This means your site does not need a cookie consent banner, and your visitor statistics are more accurate because every visitor is counted.
Plausible's dashboard is clear and simple. You log in and immediately see the most important figures: visitor numbers, most popular pages, traffic sources, and geographical distribution. It has everything an association needs for reporting to funders or evaluating the effectiveness of its communications, without unnecessary complexity.
Plausible stores all data within the EU, which makes it a strong choice from a GDPR perspective. The service is paid, but its most affordable pricing tier is more than sufficient for most associations and comes at a very reasonable cost.
A practical example: Pohjanmaan tanssi ry
When I redesigned the website for Pohjanmaan tanssi ry, their old site collected no visitor statistics at all. As part of the redesign, I installed Plausible on the new site. The association can now report concretely to their funders how many people they reach through their website each year.
Tracking visitor statistics is a solvable problem, and it doesn't need to be complicated. If your association's website isn't yet collecting visitor statistics, or if you're using Google Analytics without appropriate cookie consent, now is a good time to fix the situation.
If you'd like help setting up analytics or want to find out which solution would best suit your needs, get in touch and let's discuss it further.