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Google Analytics is free for a simple reason stated clearly by Google themselves: Google Analytics makes Google’s advertising ecosystem work better.
The future of publisher advertising is not bigger audiences - it’s better audience proof, engagement and visibility. Advertisers still want targeting. They still want to reach decision-makers, specialist buyers, policy audiences, industry professionals, wealthy consumers, technical teams, regional markets and niche communities. But the way publishers prove that audience has changed. The market is moving away from easy yet creepy and questionable third-party tracking1 and toward privacy-by-design measurement. IAB’s 2024 State of Data report found that 95% of advertising and data decision-makers at brands, agencies and publishers expected continued signal loss and privacy legislation. About 90% of ad buyers were also changing personalisation tactics because of privacy constraints and signal loss.
For publishers, analytics is not a reporting layer, it’s the commercial reporting layer. Publishers use it to prove readership, demonstrate audience growth, sell advertising, price direct campaigns, support sponsorships, justify partnerships, understand editorial performance and show the public and the market that their publication has influence. It’s also how publishers measure up against each other. Analytics is a core part of how a publisher proves value. If the audience is undercounted, the publisher is not just missing a metric, they’ll be underselling their reach, weakening their media kit, misjudging editorial performance and leaving revenue on the table.
In this article we compare Truly Analytics vs Google Analytics as a comparison between the two products. As supporting software to Google Analytics, Truly Analytics actually supports Google Analytics and fixes a lot of the shortcomings of the product without replacing Google Analytics entirely. This article will help clarify how Truly Analytics works and how it restores your actual traffic into Google Analytics whilst providing you with enhanced privacy controls and funnel integration.
Analytics tools have traditionally been used as measurement systems. They tell you how many people visited your website, which pages they viewed, which channels sent traffic and how your digital assets are performing at a broad level. Mostly they link back to advertising confirming how you spent money. They rarely ever show you how you can make money. For many businesses, analytics sits in one system, while lead generation, CRM, sales follow-up, account management and revenue tracking sit elsewhere. One platform tells you that activity happened whilst another separate set of systems handle the commercial process. The gap between the two loses untold amounts of business.
Missing traffic in Google Analytics is a common problem and needs to be addressed properly if you want clear visibility into your website. Analytics is not just a reporting tool. It is one of the clearest ways to understand the value of your site, what users are doing, what they care about and where prospects are showing intent. That visibility acts as a continuous form of customer research. Every visit, click, scroll, form interaction, page view and conversion signal gives a stronger indication of what people are interested in and how they interact with your business. When Google Analytics is missing traffic, you are not just losing numbers in a dashboard. You are losing insight into your audience, your market and your potential customers.
Traffic can drop for many reasons. The frustrating part is that, with Google and other major platforms, you usually do not get a clear answer. Unless you were directly hit with a manual action or an obvious technical failure, you are often left trying to work out whether you were caught in the crossfire of a search change, a tracking issue, a social-platform change, a reporting issue or something else entirely.
When should you use Google Analytics 360? ¶ Google Analytics is the enterprise version of Google Analytics. However, it’s the enterprise version via scale, not necessarily an improved product - it simply operates at a larger scale. Google Analytics 360 is worth considering when standard GA4 is no longer enough for your organisation. That usually means you are hitting hard limits: reporting limits, BigQuery export limits, custom dimension limits, audience limits, data retention limits, sampling limits or governance limits.
You do not need to replace Google Analytics to get better analytics. In most cases, replacing GA4 creates more problems than it solves. Google Analytics is still the expected analytics platform for most teams, buyers, investors, marketers and operators. It is free, widely understood and often treated as the default source of truth when assessing a digital asset, being offered as an independent auditor from the world’s biggest advertiser. However, it does have it’s problems with the biggest issue being that Google Analytics is often incomplete.