Visitor Analytics launches the Google Analytics Importer

When it comes to personal data and analytics, it’s a well-known fact is that privacy laws are constantly changing and are becoming more rigorous year after year. As a website owner who handles personal information (e.g. IP addresses are considered personal data in certain countries), you need to be up to date with all of these changes and use a compliant website analytics service, in order to fulfill regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and others.

Here at Visitor Analytics, we are dedicated to making your life easier in this regard and helping you be privacy compliant at all times. But not all the analytics tools have the same interest in mind, with privacy issues regularly surfacing all around the world and some even ending in billion dollars lawsuits. 

If you own a small business you might think there is no way this could ever apply to your situation, but according to GDPR.eu fines do go “up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher”. You can read more about how fines are applied on the GDPR official website.

So no matter how small or new your business is, you can never be too careful when choosing the right tools to build your online presence and you must pay extra attention when selecting a website analytics software.

Free tools might seem convenient at first, but keep in mind that even though you don’t pay for them with money, you do pay with sensitive personal data, and this might affect your business in the long run.
 

To come to your aid, we launched the Google Analytics Importer feature. From now on you will be able to safely switch to Visitor Analytics without losing the valuable data and statistics you gathered through the years. You will continue right from where you left off, only this time without having to worry about GDPR, LGPD or other similar regulations.

If you have been thinking of switching from Google Analytics to a safer option you can now import your website’s data by following a few easy steps:

• Create a Visitor Analytics account using your email address
• Log into your new account
• Go to the Website Settings menu on the left
• Select Import
• Follow the OAuth dialog to grant access to the desired webpage data you want to import
• And click Sync

Depending on the amount of historical data you plan to import, please keep in mind, that Google Analytics has quotas of data exports we must obey. This can be approximately 1 year of data that can be imported in most of the usual cases.
 

By doing this, you will be importing historical Google Analytics data into your Visitor Analytics dashboard and will begin collecting privacy-compliant data right from the moment you added your new tracking code. We highly recommend you directly activate IP anonymization and the Consentless Tracking in your account settings.

We would also recommend you to first add the Visitor Analytics tracking code to your site and right afterward import your website data from Google Analytics, this way there will be no information gap between them. You can still do this vice versa, but keep in mind can only import the Google Analytics data once per website.

Also, know that Visitor Analytics offers features such as individual visitor data, session replays, heatmaps, and other behavioral analytics and as this kind of data was not available within Google Analytics, there is nothing to import there. However, you will start getting that extra information about your website from the moment you start tracking it with Visitor Analytics. You can read more about the variety of Visitor Analytics features here.

We had previously tackled this subject and you can read all the details here. And if the paragraphs above still haven’t convinced you, here a list of advantages you will get when switching from Google Analytics to Visitor Analytics:

• No more cross-site tracking
• No data sharing/selling to third parties (all the data belongs to you)
• Cookieless tracking (say goodbye to cookie banners)
• Consentless tracking mode available (with IP anonymization)
• More diverse features to choose from (session recordings, heatmaps, etc)
• Being constantly privacy-compliant when it comes to web analytics.

By using the Google Analytics data importer feature you will get all of the above in just a few minutes, without losing any previous data. 

No matter what Visitor Analytics subscription plan you choose, all your historical data will be available to you in your new dashboard. Your current plan’s traffic limitation will not affect your historical data and most importantly you will gain access to brand new behavioral features that will help you get a much better understanding of your website’s visitors than before.