The bahtu Blog

Most startup stories that get glorified are dramatic.

If you manage analytics for more than one site, you already know the frustration. Every time a client switches themes or their developer updates the codebase, the analytics snippet breaks. Every new tracking requirement means a code change, a developer ticket, a waiting period, and another round of testing.

Attribution modeling is how marketing teams decide where growth really comes from. In other words, it’s about attributing the touchpoints (specific channels, campaigns, ads, etc.) that led someone to take a desired action (like purchase, sign up, etc.) in your business.

Europe has been building world-class digital tools for years. A major advantage is that many of these tools prioritize privacy and open-source development by default.

Backlinks are when another website (another domain) links back to you.

bahtu has been several years into business. We’re sustainably profitable and solely funded by our subscribers. We have never raised a single dollar from any investor and respectfully, don’t plan on doing so.

If you have spent years working with Google Analytics, switching tools can feel risky. GA4 includes many reports, dimensions, filters and settings. bahtu takes a different approach. You see one clean dashboard that stays simple while still giving you all the insights you need.

For a long time, website owners could collect as much data as they wanted without asking anyone. Nobody had to give consent, nobody questioned tracking, and tools like Google Analytics worked perfectly.

If you’re comparing the data that you see in your bahtu dashboard with another tool you use like Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, an email provider, Facebook ads, etc., seeing some differences is almost guaranteed.

According to multiple users’ reports, the referral traffic from ChatGPT has been declining since July 21 and more so after 7 August (i.e. the launch of GPT-5).

User behaviour keeps evolving. This means many things that used to resonate five or ten years ago, won’t now. For instance, a few years ago, it was normal to visit homepages of news outlets and now most of us prefer algorithm-curated, bite-sized news over full articles.

The traffic you see in Google Analytics could contain bots (or non-human traffic to be more precise). We tested by simulating bot traffic to a test site. Google Analytics recorded it as real traffic. Bahtu rejected it all.

If you are trying to measure and analyze the activities on your Shopify store, you can use the in-built Shopify Analytics, and pair/replace it with Google Analytics or simpler, powerful and privacy-friendly alternatives like Bahtu.

Imagine logging into Google Analytics. You want to see how your page from last month is performing – how much time does a visitor spend on average on your page. It’s 10 seconds. You end up spending marketing resources, you make strategies for improving your site’s engagement time.

☝️That’s a screenshot from the publicly open Bahtu dashboard of the European Alternatives website, featuring independent, privacy-friendly digital tools.

Scroll depth tracking has always been a crucial metric for businesses, marketers, and site owners. It helps you see how far users scroll down a page, and understand the content performance, engagement levels, and areas for improvement.

If you are noticing your website traffic is down, the first thing to do is investigate the reasons. Don’t panic, you were probably hit by a Google’s core update, something maybe off on the technical side, the site may be responding to a new trend, or you may simply need to write more/better content.

It’s an interesting time to be an online business, catching up with rapidly shifting “trends” regarding AI, increasing concerns around consumer privacy, and the one you can’t miss: shifting SEO –– one of the most favourite channels of digital marketers for more than two decades.

bahtu keeps its dashboard simple by design. But some workflows need more: custom layouts for clients, reports that blend traffic data with ad spend, or views that go beyond what a fixed dashboard can offer. That is what the official Bahtu Looker Studio connector is for.

You can track almost any activity you want on your site with modern web analytics tools. And the process has only gotten simpler during the last decade.

In 2024, the bahtu website saw a ~2,200% increase in referral traffic from four AI search engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Phind (refer to the screenshot above). These numbers were in the 100’s in 2023.

The Google Analytics 4 interface has multiple reports, beneath multiple layers of menus. Some reports are standard, i.e. pre-made and available by default, while others are custom (“Explorations”) that you need to create on your own from scratch.

If you run paid campaigns on Google, Bing, Instagram, any newsletters, or even sponsored videos, etc., to drive sales or other conversion actions like sign-up, it’s a good idea to integrate an analytics tool. This helps fill blind spots about what was actually done on the website after someone clicked on your ad.

When you first see your bounce rate of x%, it can be confusing making you think about what it is, is it good to have a higher or lower bounce rate, how is it being calculated for my site, what are some industry benchmarks, what can I do to improve it, etc. Let’s answer all questions.

Having a website means having landing pages and tracking the traffic and performance of pages can bring great amounts of marketing and business insights.

Most of the time, we visit a site or a blog with a goal (or at least intent) in mind. Imagine you’re searching for home workout ideas and land on a fitness blog with hundreds of unorganized posts. You were likely looking for something specific, like “yoga for beginners” or “quick cardio routines.”

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Tracking the performance of your WooCommerce store doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it’s incredibly straightforward with the bahtu plugin for WordPress, allowing you to set up end-to-end ecommerce site monitoring with just one click.

You’ve probably seen those pop-ups on websites, sweetly offering you cookies. Those are cookie consent banners.

As a business with an online presence, you’ll almost definitely have, at least one of, a SaaS application, a blog, an online store, product documentation, or anything table stakes such as these.

Whether you’ve recently added a new tracking snippet to your site or have reasons to believe that your website analytics might not be functioning properly, it’s a good idea to verify if your analytics setup is correctly installed.

Navigating a Google Analytics account gives me tiny shots of anxiety. The sentiment is always: “Why is GA4 so bad?” It makes me think “What if I do something wrong?”, “What if I end up changing a setting?” or “How do I apply a metric to this report now?”.

Web analytics, as the name suggests, came around for helping website-owners visualize data about different elements of their website. This’d help them optimize web usage.

An e-commerce website has various ways of earning sales. Customers can find you through your ads, email campaigns, social campaigns, SEO, directly visiting your website and more. The process of understanding which channels are the most effective for your e-commerce store to generate sales is known as ecommerce revenue attribution.

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics or bahtu provide basic information, but they can’t automatically track everything you need. Custom dimensions allow you to capture specific data that goes beyond standard metrics.

If you have downloadable files on your website, such as PDFs, eBooks, apps, brochures, etc., and are curious about how they are performing, i.e. which files were downloaded, from where on your website, by which audience, etc., then it can be done using analytics tools like Google Analytics, a privacy-friendly alternative like bahtu, or other methods.

Funnels have been around ever since digital marketing wasn’t even a thing. Earlier developed as a technique for door-to-door salespersons to describe their product, it evolved to become many things, and even changed shapes in response to the evolving customer journeys.

Quick update: Google announced recently that they are delaying the phasing out of third-party cookies. This is an effort to buy time to balance out the advertising industry’s needs and that of privacy advocates. This buys advertisers some time, but the phase-out (in whatever shape it comes) is still around the corner. It’s useful to prepare for this eventuality. Let’s see how, below.

Quick update: Google announced recently that they are delaying the phasing out of third-party cookies. This is an effort to buy time to balance out the advertising industry’s needs and that of privacy advocates. This buys marketers some time, but the phase-out (in whatever shape it comes) is still around the corner. It’s useful to prepare for this eventuality. Let’s see how, below.

In this article, Steffen Gross, an experienced data protection expert and lawyer at Simpliant Legal PartG mbB and external data protection officer at Simpliant GmbH, explains how web analytics can be implemented in accordance with the strict requirements of the ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR.

TL;DR: We’re introducing the “free as in beer”, self-hosted and AGPL-licensed bahtu Community Edition (CE). Installation instructions are here.

Is Google Analytics illegal? Yes, say the Austrian, French, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish and other European Data Protection Authorities. Here’s why.

Are you considering migrating from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 but are unsure about the differences between the two and how to succeed with the transition?

We’ve reached a significant milestone of $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with Bahtu, a simple, lightweight, open source and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics.

Google just dropped big news on the business and marketing world! Universal Google Analytics, the current version of Google Analytics, will be sunset and will stop counting stats on July 1st 2023. The new Google Analytics 4 will be replacing Universal Analytics.

We’ve had an amazing journey to date. It took us 324 days to reach $400 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) since we got our first paying subscriber on May 14 2019. Then things got a bit crazy.

There are several privacy concerns with running Google Analytics but there are worries about data accuracy too. How much data is missing from Google Analytics due to adblockers and privacy-friendly browsers?

We’ve grown from less than 100 subscribers to more than 4,000 subscribers since April 2020. With all this success also comes a growing volume of support requests.

Google is rolling out a significant change as a part of their page experience ranking algorithm in June 2021.

As a site owner, you’ve probably heard about Google’s page experience update and the introduction of Core Web Vitals but what does it all mean?

Google is starting to track your site visitors for advertising purposes even when you’re not using Google Analytics or having any relationship with Google.

Started your WordPress site, published some posts and now want to get some stats to figure out how you’re doing? It’s time to install a WordPress plugin for web analytics.

We’ve made it to $10,000 MRR with bahtu! Several people asked about our lessons learned, so I wanted to share some in this post.

Bahtu is the first open source project I’ve been involved in as a developer and maintainer. And what a great journey it has been until now.

Having 404 error pages on your website can lead to a bad user experience, a negative first impression, and even damage your search engine rankings and traffic you get from SEO.

Outbound links play a significant role on the open web, but how do you track clicks on outbound links using your website analytics? Here’s a guide on how to automate external link click tracking on your site using Google Analytics and Bahtu. Let’s get started.

TL;DR: If you collect personal data or use cookies, a privacy policy is legally required. If you don’t, you should still have one to show visitors you take their privacy seriously.

We experienced big growth in October, breaking our traffic and signup records once again. These numbers can be attributed to Marko who published three articles that landed on the front page of Hacker News. Here are the stats from last month:

Bahtu is a software as a service open source web analytics project. With the increase in popularity of bahtu in recent months, we’ve become aware that there are risks associated with permissive open source licenses that corporations that don’t care about open source are happy to take advantage of.

bahtu seems to be settling into a more steady rate of growth. I had to double our server capacity in late September to accommodate the new trial signups and customers. Here are the stats from last month:

UTM parameters help you understand where your traffic is coming from. They can illuminate dark traffic, track paid campaigns and pinpoint which content drives results.

Apple has declared privacy a “fundamental human right” and now they’re putting their money where their mouth is, and doing something about it. Apple’s Safari 14 browser and its Privacy Report names, shames and prevents websites that use cross-site trackers to profile web users.

Bahtu is a simple, lightweight, privacy-first and open-source web analytics. We reject, exclude and say no to the majority of the best marketing practices for growing a startup.

The recap for this month is a week late because I just got back from holiday. I’ve been working on bahtu pretty much non-stop all this year so it felt great to take a breather. We still got a lot done in August:

We’ve just had a successful Product Hunt launch for Bahtu. More than 850 upvotes, more than 100 comments, featured twice on the official Twitter account and in the daily and weekly newsletters too.

Bahtu is a simple, lightweight, open source and privacy-friendly web analytics tool. We’re a SaaS startup with subscriptions as a business model.

This last month I’ve been able to get into a nice groove with development. We added a couple of new metrics that should help customers understand their traffic better.

Google’s Chrome browser is the most popular web browser. It has a market share of more than 70%. Whatever new policy Chrome implements will have an affect on all websites as chances are the majority of your visitors use Chrome too.

The last few months have been remarkable for Bahtu. We got more than 180,000 visitors in this period which is a 2,200% increase compared to the prior period. We also saw 10x more trial signups and a 690% increase in subscribers.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is a Californian privacy law that has been inspired by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but it also differs from it in several ways.

This post announced our move to EU infrastructure in 2020. For a current overview of our EU hosting setup, see our EU hosting page.

June was easily the best month of all time for bahtu. We added some large customers and had our biggest revenue growth ever, both in absolute ($) and relative (%) terms.

What’s the difference between server logs such as AWStats and JavaScript-based web analytics such as Google Analytics? Are client side or server side analytics more accurate? And which should I use on my website? Let’s take a look.

Many open source projects are terribly under-resourced and under-funded. Some open source developers even have to sacrifice their financial security to work on their passion.

Bahtu has been open source since September 2019 but we haven’t offered a convenient way for people to host the code on their own infrastructure. There’s always been a strong interest from the community to self-host the code.

Let’s take a look at the meaning of GDPR, how it impacts web analytics, whether you can take any steps to make Google Analytics GDPR compliant and also explore our GDPR compliant Google Analytics alternative.

Last month we joined Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo over at changelog.com to talk about Bahtu.

Another month, another update. Here’s what went down with bahtu in May:

Are you confused about using Google Analytics on your website, the cookies and the requirement to show the cookie consent banner to your visitors? And can you have a cookieless web analytics alternative to Google Analytics? This post is here to figure it all out. Let’s get started.

April 2020 was by far the most successful month in bahtu’s history. Here are the highlights from the last month:

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been in touch with many different website owners who are considering our Google Analytics alternative product. I’ve been surprised by the number of people who have asked something along these lines:

Google Analytics is the largest web analytics platform. 84% of sites that use a known web analytics provider, use Google Analytics to track their visitors and get website statistics.

We recently relaunched Bahtu as a no-cookie, GDPR compliant alternative to Google Analytics. We had some very eventful days and here’s what we learned.

We are working on a leaner and more transparent alternative to Google Analytics. It’s called Bahtu and it comes without all the privacy baggage. Here’s a look at some of the issues with Google Analytics.

March has been one of the weirdest months in my life. I had a week-long holiday in France just before most countries went into lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak. I flew back to Estonia 2 days before the borders were closed. Having flown through Geneva airport, I had to strictly self-quarantine for 14 days.

As promised, here’s another monthly update on building bahtu. February was a really good month:

I haven’t been regular with updates on how bahtu is doing, but I intend to put more effort into this blog this year. Let’s kick things off with the highlights for January 2020:

If you’re running a website with Google Analytics installed, you may be wondering how it affects the privacy of your website’s visitors. There’s a growing distrust towards the digital advertising sector but what are the actual issues besides calling out ‘creepy’ ads? Let’s discuss the wider ethical questions around personal data collection and digital targeting.

One of the main reasons I started bahtu was to provide a more transparent alternative to Google Analytics. I believe that people should be able to control and know about their data, instead of having it sold to the advertisers behind their back.

If you’ve ever had to develop transactional HTML emails with slick designs, you’ll know that it’s a complete mess. The incompatibilities between email clients are way worse than what you see with different browsers. Testing emails is extremely difficult, and there’s a seemingly endless number of problems with various clients.

I spent the second half of June back home in Estonia to recharge my batteries and reconnect with family+friends. Summer solstice is a huge celebration in Estonian culture so everyone seems to be on holiday at the moment, enjoying nature, good food and drinks. I haven’t had as much time for bahtu as I normally do, but I’m totally OK with that.

For more than a decade I used a variety of products made by Google. Their products and services are reliable, intuitive, and often free to use. Like many other programmers, I really looked up to the company and followed their rapid rise to one of the biggest companies in the world.

It’s been 4 months since I wrote about the analytics tool I want. My idea was to create an alternative for Google Analytics that simplifies the UI and enhances the privacy of online tracking.

Solo founders and makers often have a dilemma: when communicating with customers, should I describe myself as I or we? It’s tempting to use a royal we, even if you’re working on a product alone:

The meteoric rise of front-end frameworks like React, Angular, Vue.js, Elm, etc. has made single-page applications ubiquitous on the web. For many developers, these have become part of their ‘default’ toolset. When they start a new project, they grab the tools they know already: a REST API on the backend, and a React/Angular/Vue/Elm frontend.

This week, I worked on some under-the-hood improvements to bahtu to give me better insights into my userbase. One of these was to store a last_seen timestamp for all users. This is a private piece of data that I use to determine:

• How many users are actively logging on and checking their analytics
• What is the average usage frequency of bahtu?
• When should I consider an account as ‘rotting’? Meaning I’m about to lose them as a user/customer

In general I don’t think that the tech stack matters too much for software projects. Especially if you’re a solo maker, almost all of the risk is on the sales and marketing side as opposed to the tech side. The best approach is normally to just pick some boring tools and start solving your customers’ problems.

Working on www.bahtuapp.com I often find myself doing things I have no clue how to do. I struggle massively with marketing, copywriting, and most of all, UX/UI design. Here are some tips I’ve found helpful when trying to design for the web as an unimaginative developer who hasn’t designed a single thing in his life.

While working on Gigride, our marketing head asked me to integrate Google Analytics for our landing page. My first thought was: