Why we chose Vercel Analytics over Google Analytics

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title: "Why we chose Vercel Analytics over Google Analytics" date: "2025-04-04" summary: "Most analytics tools treat your visitors as a product. We explain the choice we made and why it matters if you care about your users."

Every website needs to know what's working. Are people finding the blog? Which services page gets the most traffic? Is anyone actually clicking "Get a Quote"?

The default answer in 2025 is still Google Analytics. It's free, it's familiar, and it answers all of those questions.

We chose not to use it. Here's why.

What Google Analytics actually does

When you install Google Analytics, you're not just adding a visitor counter. You're adding a tracking script that:

• Identifies individual users across sessions using cookies
• Tracks behaviour across other sites that also run Google Analytics
• Sends all of that data to Google's servers, where it feeds into their advertising business
• Requires a cookie consent banner to be legal in most jurisdictions

That last point is the part we find dishonest. Most cookie banners are designed to make accepting easy and rejecting hard — that's a dark pattern. We don't want to build one, and we don't want to pressure our visitors into accepting tracking they didn't ask for.

What we use instead

We use Vercel Analytics. It's built into our deployment platform and works differently by design:

• No cookies. It doesn't identify individual users.
• No cross-site tracking. It only knows about visits to our site.
• No consent banner needed. Because there's nothing to consent to.
• We only see aggregates. Page views, referrers, general device info. Not who you are.

We lose some depth — we can't build conversion funnels or track individual user journeys. That's the tradeoff we made, and we think it's the right one.

Why this matters

You might be thinking: does this actually affect me as a visitor?

It affects all of us, collectively. Every site that installs Google Analytics makes it easier for Google to build a detailed picture of how people move around the web. The more sites opt out of that system, the less complete that picture becomes.

For us, it's also a consistency question. We build products that we'd want to use ourselves. We write honest copy. We don't use manipulative UI patterns. Using a surveillance-based analytics tool on our own website while telling clients to build ethically would be a contradiction we couldn't ignore.

The honest tradeoff

Vercel Analytics gives us less data. We're fine with that.

If we need richer behavioural data at some point in the future — to understand a specific conversion problem, say — we'd look at privacy-first options like Plausible or Fathom, both of which are designed from the ground up to be GDPR-compliant without dark patterns.

For now, knowing which pages people visit and where they came from is enough. We'd rather have a little honest data than a lot of compromised data.