Why we stopped recommending Google Analytics in 2024, the two-hour migration we now standardise on, and the privacy posture it gives every client by default.
By Hanova Editorial
We stopped reaching for Google Analytics as the default on new builds and moved to self-hosted, privacy-first analytics. The reasons were partly about owning the data, partly about speed, and partly about giving every client a defensible privacy position without a consent banner that scares away half their traffic.
A self-hosted tool keeps the data in a database you control, in a country you choose, with nothing handed to an ad platform by default. That matters more every year. Kenya's Data Protection Act, and the GDPR for clients with European visitors, both push toward collecting less personal data and being clear about what you do collect. Cookieless, aggregate analytics avoids most of that surface area. As a bonus, lighter scripts load faster, and because privacy tools are blocked far less often than GA, the numbers tend to sit closer to reality.
We ship one of two, depending on how much depth a client needs.
Plausible is a single lightweight script, cookieless by design, with a clean dashboard for the metrics most businesses actually act on: visitors, sources, top pages and conversions.
Umami is similarly light and privacy-first, with a footprint that is trivial to run and a data model that is easy to query directly when a client wants custom reporting.
Both run comfortably as a small containerised service. The app and its database sit behind a reverse proxy with TLS. The tracking script runs on a subdomain of the client's own domain, so it is first-party and not blocked as a third-party tracker. And the database is backed up automatically, because once it is the source of truth it deserves the same care as any other production data.
The whole migration usually takes a couple of hours. Stand up the service, add the first-party script, watch the events arrive in real time, and remove the old GA snippet.
Because the default setup collects no personal data and sets no cookies, most clients can run it with a far simpler consent prompt, or none at all. Visitors get a faster site and the business gets honest numbers, without anyone's browsing history going to an advertising network.
There is one honest trade-off. Privacy-first tools deliberately do not track individuals across sites, so a client who genuinely needs ad retargeting will still run that platform's pixel behind consent. For understanding your own site, though, self-hosted analytics is the cleaner default, and it is the one we now start from.
Up to 90 percent of the data a business holds is never looked at, yet analytics projects routinely pay for themselves within a year. Here is what a data analysis engagement actually involves, and why Kenyan SMEs start closer to the finish line than they think.
