Analytics & GDPR
GDPR Alternative to Google Analytics
Let’s start with what pages like this usually leave out: Subtraq does not replace Google Analytics. If you want to measure your SITE, the right answers are Matomo and Plausible. But there’s a chance your real problem is somewhere else — and that’s what this page is about.
The question behind the question
Do I want to measure my site — or my campaigns?
GA and its alternatives measure a website. An agency, a creator, a freelancer mostly wants to measure what they distribute — posts, newsletters, flyers. And none of those show up in a site analytics tool.
Answering this question first saves you from installing three tools only to find out the problem was the fourth.
What replaces what
Three different needs, three different tool families. Mixing them up is the source of half the frustration in this space.
| Site analytics (GA, Matomo, Plausible) | Link tracking (Subtraq) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | visits to YOUR website | clicks on YOUR links, wherever they live |
| Sees an Instagram story | no — only when the visitor lands on the site | yes — the link lives there |
| Sees a flyer, a storefront QR code | no | yes |
| Sees in-site navigation | yes — that is its job | no — that is not its job |
| Links a sale to a campaign | partially, via UTM tags and configuration | yes — that is its job |
| Requires a script on the site | yes | no — nothing to install |
| Replaces Google Analytics | yes | no, and it does not claim to |
If your need is the left column with better privacy guarantees than GA: Matomo (self-hostable) and Plausible (lightweight, European) are the benchmarks in the SERP you just left — for good reason.
The shared blind spot
GDPR-compliant is the baseline. Useful is better.
Many people land on this search for a GDPR reason and leave with the same blind spot: a site analytics tool — any of them — only sees a campaign at the moment it touches the site. Everything before that — the bio, the story, the podcast, the print piece — stays invisible.
Link tracking takes the problem from the other end: it lives WHERE the campaign lives, and needs no script, no banner, no website.
The test in one question
“How much did the March newsletter bring in?” — If your site analytics can’t answer that, the problem wasn’t Google: it was the measurement layer missing above the site.
Frequently asked questions
Matomo or Plausible — which one?
For a website: Matomo if you want to own and self-host everything, Plausible if you want something lightweight, managed, and European. We have no horse in that race — compare them against your own needs, not our say-so.
Can Subtraq coexist with a site analytics tool?
Perfectly — that’s the most common setup: analytics watches the site, links watch the campaigns. The UTM tags your links carry are read by analytics as well, so the two layers complement each other.
Does link tracking require a consent banner?
The link itself sets no third-party cookies and the IP is never stored. The optional SDK writes an identifier in first-party storage on your client’s site — their privacy policy should mention it. Full details are on our GDPR page, written to be shown to a DPO.
What about e-commerce with heavy site traffic?
There, site analytics is central and link tracking is an acquisition add-on. Our sweet spot is the opposite: businesses whose sales start OUTSIDE the website — agencies, creators, services.
Measure your next campaign
Drop a link on your next campaign and watch the “revenue” column fill in. That’s the measurement layer you were missing — not another GA replacement.
Try it free