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-- 4 min read

How to migrate from Google Analytics to Web-Tracking.eu

A practical, honest guide to leaving GA4 behind. What to set up on Web-Tracking.eu, what you keep, what you lose, and how to bring your historical data with you.

Why people leave Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free, and that single fact has kept it in place on millions of sites for over a decade. But the conversation has shifted. The reasons people give for migrating in 2026 are roughly the same five every time:

  • Legal exposure in the EU. Multiple data protection authorities have found that GA4, even with IP anonymisation, sends personal data to the United States in a way that conflicts with GDPR after Schrems II. The risk is not theoretical.
  • GA4 itself is hard. Universal Analytics was straightforward. GA4 introduced an event model that most non-technical users find genuinely confusing. "Engaged sessions," "key events," and the differences between standard and custom dimensions are a learning curve nobody asked for.
  • Cookies and consent banners. GA4 sets cookies. Cookies trigger ePrivacy Article 5(3). Consent banners reduce the data you actually capture, sometimes by 40 to 60 percent.
  • Page weight. The GA4 tag is not small, and Google Tag Manager on top of it adds more. Your Lighthouse score notices.
  • Data sampling and threshold redactions. On lower-volume sites, GA4 will hide rows for "user privacy" and sample reports beyond a threshold. You stop trusting what you see.

Honest counterpoint: GA4 is free, has Google Ads integration that no European tool will match, and BigQuery export is genuinely useful if you have a data team. If those things matter to you more than anything else, stay.

What is different about Web-Tracking.eu

Web-Tracking.eu is hosted in Germany on Hetzner, stores nothing on the visitor's device, and processes everything server-side. Because nothing is written to or read from the user's browser, ePrivacy Article 5(3) is not engaged, so you don't need a cookie banner for the analytics layer. The dashboard shows page views, referrers, devices, countries, UTM campaigns, and an engagement score per visit (bounce, skim, engaged, gold) that GA4 has no equivalent for.

Step-by-step migration

  1. Create a Web-Tracking.eu account on the free tier. You get 10,000 events per month and one site, which is enough to run in parallel with GA4 for a month and compare numbers.
  2. Add your domain in the dashboard. You'll get a single <script> tag under 1 KB.
  3. Install the script in your site's <head>. If you use WordPress, the official plugin handles this for you. If you use Google Tag Manager, you can drop the script into a Custom HTML tag — but the cleanest setup is direct in the template.
  4. Run GA4 and Web-Tracking.eu side by side for two to four weeks. Numbers will differ. Web-Tracking.eu typically reports 20 to 60 percent more sessions because it captures visitors who decline cookie consent.
  5. Import historical data. Web-Tracking.eu has a one-click GA4 import that pulls your historical aggregates so you don't lose your year-over-year comparisons.
  6. Connect Search Console in settings to merge organic search query data into the same dashboard.
  7. Update your privacy policy. Remove the Google Analytics paragraph. Add a short note that your analytics are cookieless and EU-hosted. If you have a consent banner only because of GA4, you can usually remove it now — check your other tags first.
  8. Remove the GA4 tag from your site after you're confident the new tool is working.

What you'll lose

Be honest with yourself about what you're giving up.

  • Google Ads attribution. If you spend on Google Ads, GA4 has the cleanest path back to ad-spend ROI. Web-Tracking.eu will track UTM campaigns, but it doesn't talk to the Ads API.
  • Audience exports for remarketing. GA4 can build audiences and push them to Google Ads. Cookieless analytics fundamentally cannot.
  • BigQuery raw event export. If you have a data warehouse pipeline that depends on GA4 raw events, you'll need to keep GA4 or build something else.
  • Some advanced funnel reports that GA4 builds out of the box. Web-Tracking.eu has goal tracking and conversion funnels, but the level of customisation is lower.

What you'll gain

  • A dashboard you can actually read in under a minute.
  • Numbers that include consent-decliners.
  • A page-load impact under 1 KB instead of GA4's 50+ KB.
  • An engagement score per visit that tells you whether the user actually read the page or just bounced.
  • An auditable position under GDPR and ePrivacy: data stays in Germany, nothing is on the device, and there is a clear DPA on file.
  • One less consent banner to maintain.

Try the free tier

If you want to run a parallel test, the free tier is enough for most small and medium sites. 10,000 events per month, one domain, full feature set. Sign up at web-tracking.eu and you can have the script live in five minutes.