I received a strange question today. A user was telling me how critical it is that their analytics plugin, Jetpack Stats, works in a specific way with WooCommerce. This got me thinking – wait – why do you need Jetpack Stats? What happens if you ever switch away from WordPress? What if you continue to use WordPress but WordPress.com goes out of business? Am I the only one that worries about these issues?
Good Reasons to Use Jetpack Stats
I use Jetpack Stats on my site but they're really just for fun. I like the pretty graph on my WordPress dashboard and I like that you can drill pretty deep from within the WordPress admin. If you do you use different analytics software then you can also compare the two and see how some pieces of analytics work better for certain types of data. All of these are really great reasons to use the Jetpack Stats. But no matter how good Jetpack Stats get I'm not going to use it as my main site analytics.
Good Reasons to Use Google Analytics
You should definitely use analytics that aren't tied to a specific content management system. Someday that CMS might not exist anymore and you don't want your stats to disappear do you? WordPress is great, WordPress is easy, and I think WordPress is changing the world but I don't for a second think that it'll last forever. Using a 3rd party analytics software can protect your data.
If you're into the fancy dashboard analytics like Jetpack offers, there's a plugin for that.
Don't Blackberry Yourself
In 2007 Blackberry's sales were up and businesses everywhere loved them. Now they're not even mentioned in most Android Vs iOS articles. In 7 short years Blackberry has gone from the top of the market straight to the bottom.
No one saw this coming it just happened. People didn't even know they wanted a iPhone before they were revealed. Blackberry was a step behind the game and in the IT world that can kill you in an instant.
Should WordPress ever start to lose popularity among web developers, or if you ever need to switch away from WordPress then you have that data ready to go. So don't worry about WordPress stats plugins. They're fun, they look cool, and they're easy to set up, but should you use then you'll have your data locked away. Data you might not be able to get back. Don't do that to yourself if you don't have to. At least make a “backup” of your data with Google Analytics.