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A Marketer's Guide to Umami Analytics
Posted by Nick Andrews

As marketers, we need to understand our marketing efforts deeply to help optimize them and ultimately produce business outcomes. In a world where generative AI is now fully integrated into marketing, taking more and more tasks off marketers' plates, businesses are realizing that they likely need smaller marketing teams to accomplish the same amount of work.

With that in mind, marketers must embrace data-driven, outcome-producing marketing efforts to demonstrate their value to the business. Long gone are the days when clicks or Likes are enough. Marketers are now in a world where they must prove their value and efforts with clear attribution.

It is no secret that marketers dislike Google Analytics 4. Whether it was the forced migration, the complicated and confusing UI, or needing more advanced tools like Google Tag Manager to understand your data, GA4 has been a negative experience. Since GA4 isn't the answer, we must find another web analytics solution that provides clear attribution and is simple and easy to use. Enter Umami.

In this blog post, we will look at Umami and how marketers can use it to track their websites and marketing efforts.

Key Umami Features at a Glance

Umami is jam-packed with features, but let's look at a few key features that marketers care about:

  • Umami doesn't use cookies, so you won't have to display an annoying opt-in cookie banner on your website. Depending on what else you're doing, you might still have to put one, but you won't have to do so regarding Umami website analytics.
  • Umami installs with a single line of code. You can copy and paste the script between your website's <head> section. Compare that to GA4, which has a dizzying amount of options and unnecessary features and likely requires you to integrate with Google Tag Manager to fully unlock all the benefits, such as custom event tracking (which further complicates installation and maintenance).
  • Umami simplifies event tracking. There are many useless out-of-the-box events that GA4 automatically starts tracking, which creates a lot of noise. Classic Google, automatically turning things on it thinks you want! For example, scroll depth might be necessary to your marketing efforts, but generally speaking, scroll depth is only looked at if you are deeply into conversion rate optimization (CRO), which means you probably have a CRO tool like Mutiny.
  • Umami can process links with UTM parameters. To get the maximum benefit from Umami, use UTM parameters on all links in your marketing efforts, which you are probably already doing.
  • Umami has dark mode. While not critical to measuring your marketing efforts but is essential to creating a better user experience. Dark mode can be turned on/off with a single click inside the UI, and no add-ons, plugins, or browser extensions are required.

All the basics in a single pane of glass

A key feature of Umami is how it displays the basics. The core basics to understanding your website activity are available in a single window. Compare this to GA4 (and even UA), where the data you want to review can sometimes be hard to find under a menu, sub-menu, or sub-sub-menu.

  • Visitor info: Get detailed information about your visitors, such as their device, browser, OS, and location.
  • Page views: Knowing which pages get the most traffic is essential to improving your website content.
  • Bounce rate: See which pages engage your visitors versus those they abandon.
  • Traffic sources: See where your traffic is coming from to understand better where you should spend your effort.
  • Filtering: Gain further insight into your data by applying country, browser, and URL filters.
  • Location: Find out where your visitors are coming from, including the city, region, and country.
  • Languages: Know which languages are the most popular among your visitors to help you tailor your content.
  • Real-time data: Data is available in seconds rather than days. The data that Umami collects is immediately available on your dashboard.
  • Custom events: Use custom events to track everything on your website, like signups and cart checkouts.
  • UTM tracking: Measure the effectiveness of your campaign by analyzing UTM query parameters that are automatically collected.

Custom reporting lives inside Umami

You can export your data if you want (you own your data in Umami), or you can build custom reports inside Umami. There is no real need to export your data to a 3rd party system like Lookeror Grafana. Some of the possibilities for custom reports inside Umami include:

  • Insights: Dive deeper into your data by using segments and filters.
  • Funnel: Understand the conversion and drop-off rate of users.
  • Retention: Measure your website stickiness by tracking how often users return.

Real-World Example: How to Use Umami to Track Marketing-Generated Business Outcomes on a Landing Page

Let's review a common marketing scenario that needs to be tracked and explain how Umami can help: tracking performance on a Landing Page.

Landing pages are ubiquitous for marketers, and we use them for various tactics. Tracking what happens when traffic hits that landing page is essential. Let's review a real-world example of how we do this at Umami by reviewing the following landing page: https://umami.is/google-analytics: The first thing we can do in Umami is view metrics just on this landing page by filtering by URL. We can then use data filters to understand traffic via query parameters (UTM parameters) to determine how people arrived on the page. We can then use data filters to understand the events on the page. For example, has someone clicked the Get Started or Free Trial buttons?

You can then return to your leadership and recommend adjusting the marketing spend based on actual data. Also, when you determine what is producing the desired outcomes, you can go to leadership and ask for more budget because you will have the information and data you need to tell them the precise return on ad spend per channel.

Conclusion

Umami is a simple, easy-to-use, and powerful web analytics solution that can help marketers track their marketing efforts and website activity. With features like simplified event tracking, UTM tracking, and custom reporting, it provides a comprehensive view of your website's performance. By using Umami, marketers can demonstrate their value to the business by providing clear attribution and producing outcome-driven marketing efforts. So, if you're looking for a web analytics solution that can help you optimize your marketing efforts, give Umami a try. Start tracking your website activity today and make data-driven decisions to achieve your marketing goals.

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