On privacy-safe web analytics, compliance, and the choices organisations make (or should make).
Almost every organisation has an intranet, but hardly anyone knows what actually happens on it. This guide covers the four measurement areas of intranet analytics, the available tools, and the privacy rules that public sector organisations in particular need to account for.
Many public sector organisations are still running GA4, even as its legal defensibility has been under pressure for years. The question is no longer whether you need to act, but whether you do it in-house or hand it to an agency.
SharePoint Online has built-in usage statistics. Most intranet editors are unaware of them, and the administrators who do know rarely use them. This article explains why those built-in statistics create privacy problems for public sector organisations, what an intranet editor actually needs, and why intranet data should not sit in Microsoft infrastructure.
How Simple Analytics, Plausible and Govanalytics each measure visitor data, and why 'no cookies, no fingerprint, no personal data' is a built-in product promise for two of them and a configuration choice for the third.
Ask AI is coming to govanalytics. Ask your analytics data a question in plain language, with your dashboard context already loaded. Deliberately kept as simple as possible, and fully within the [gov] standard: you choose the model, read-only, one property per session.
Matomo has solved the privacy question for many public organisations. The question that has replaced it: what do you do when Matomo's limits — scalability, data model, operational burden — start to show?
How do you explain to the board that the digital service metrics you've been reporting for three years come from a tool you're no longer really allowed to use? The question is no longer whether to leave GA4; it's how to do so responsibly without discarding your entire measurement strategy.
Govanalytics is a GDPR-compliant web analytics platform built for Dutch public sector organisations. It measures website and intranet usage without cookies and without a consent banner, with data stored exclusively in the Netherlands. Govanalytics is a privacy-safe alternative to Google Analytics built for government: BIO-compliant, fully documented, and without data transfer outside the EU.
European public organisations are no longer asking whether they need to leave US-hosted analytics. They're asking how, and what comes next — and they're asking under time pressure. After ten years of variations on this conversation, this is what I believe to be true.
