You’ve decided to leave Google Analytics. Maybe because GA4’s interface is inscrutable. Maybe because the €1.2 billion Meta fine made your legal team nervous about data transfers to the US. Maybe because you’re tired of explaining to visitors why your “cookie consent” banner has an Accept All button the size of a country and a Reject button in 6px grey text.

Whatever the reason, you’re in good company. According to W3Techs, GA4 adoption among European websites dropped 11% between 2024 and 2026, while GDPR-compliant alternatives grew 23% in the same period. The migration wave is real, and it’s accelerating.

Here’s a checklist we built from helping European teams move off GA4 over the last two years.

Week 0: Before You Touch Anything

1. Export your historical data. GA4’s data retention is 14 months by default, but you can change it to 26 months in Data Settings. Do that, wait 24 hours for it to take effect, then export everything via the Reporting API or Google Takeout. Store the exports in a dedicated S3 bucket or Google Cloud Storage — not in someone’s Downloads folder.

2. Document your current setup. Map every property, every data stream, every custom event, every conversion, every audience definition, and every dashboard that depends on GA4. You will rediscover events someone created in 2023 for a campaign that ended in 2023 and nobody remembers. This is normal.

3. Identify dependent tools. Which tools pull from GA4 via API? Examples: Looker Studio dashboards, BigQuery exports, Google Ads conversion import, email tools that use GA4 audiences, A/B testing tools that read GA4 experiments. Each of these needs a migration plan or an alternative.

4. Set a cutoff date. Pick a date when you’ll switch from dual-tracking (both GA4 and your new tool) to single-tracking (new tool only). Communicate this date widely. The clean cutoff is easier to reason about than a gradual fade-out.

Week 1: Choose Your Replacement

The analytics market has split into three categories since 2023:

Cookieless/web analytics (Plausible, Fathom, Glinto, Simple Analytics). These tools count pageviews, referrers, and geographic distribution. They don’t create user profiles, don’t track across sessions, and don’t require cookie consent. Good if you need honest metrics without the complexity.

Product analytics (PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude). These tools track user behaviour — feature adoption, retention cohorts, funnel analysis. They create user profiles and require consent. Good if you need to understand how users interact with your product, not just your marketing site.

Enterprise suites (Adobe Analytics, Piwik PRO). Full-featured platforms with compliance certifications, data processing agreements, and dedicated support. Good if you’re a large company with complex reporting requirements and a dedicated analytics team.

Most European teams need a combination: a cookieless tool for public-facing sites, a product analytics tool for the app, and a BI layer (Metabase, Looker, Tableau) to combine them.

Week 2: Technical Migration

1. Add the new tracking script. Glinto’s is 6 lines of HTML. Paste it in your <head>. Other tools are similar. Run dual-tracking for at least a week to establish a baseline before turning off GA4.

2. Recreate your key reports. Don’t try to replicate every GA4 report. Instead, ask each stakeholder: “What’s the one question you need answered every week?” Build reports for those questions and nothing else. You’ll be surprised how few people actually need the full GA4 dashboard.

3. Check your cookie consent. If you’re moving to a cookieless analytics tool (Glinto, Plausible, Fathom), you can remove your cookie consent banner for analytics purposes. You may still need it for other cookies (marketing, chat widgets, A/B testing tools). Either way, consult your legal team — this is the part where you need professional advice specific to your jurisdiction.

4. Update your privacy policy. If you’re switching from a tool that uses cookies to one that doesn’t, your privacy policy needs updating. Be specific: name the tool, explain what data it collects (page URLs, referrers, device types), confirm it doesn’t use cookies or fingerprinting, and state where the data is processed (for Glinto: within the EU).

Week 3: Import Historical Data

Most analytics tools offer a GA4 data import. At Glinto, we built a one-click importer that pulls your GA4 export and maps it to our schema — pageviews, countries, referrers, and device categories. It takes about 10 minutes for a site with 100,000 monthly pageviews.

If your new tool doesn’t offer import, you have two options:

  • Keep the GA4 exports as static CSV files for occasional reference
  • Build a custom ETL pipeline that transforms GA4 data into your new tool’s database format

Option 1 is usually sufficient. Most teams only look at historical data during quarterly reports or investor updates, and a CSV in a shared drive works fine for that.

Week 4: Go Live and Train the Team

1. Switch off dual-tracking. Remove the GA4 script from your site. This is the moment your legal team has been waiting for: no more US-based data processing, no more consent banner requirement for analytics, no more GA4 complexity.

2. Train your team. Schedule a 30-minute session where you walk through the new dashboard. Focus on the 3–4 reports people actually need, not the 50 reports the tool can generate. The goal is for every stakeholder to feel confident looking at the dashboard without opening a help ticket.

3. Archive GA4. Export one final time (in case the export window extends beyond the switch-off date), then archive the GA4 property. Don’t delete it for at least 3 months — you might need to cross-reference something.

Common Pitfalls

“We’ll run both tools for a few months just to be safe.” This is the most common migration anti-pattern. Dual-tracking creates confusion: GA4 reports 1,200 pageviews and the new tool reports 980. Which one is right? The discrepancy is usually caused by ad-blockers (which block GA4 but not cookieless tools) and bot traffic (which tools handle differently). Pick a cutoff date and stick to it.

“We need to rebuild every GA4 report in the new tool.” No, you don’t. Most GA4 reports were created by well-meaning analytics consultants who wanted to be thorough. Ask your team what they actually use and rebuild only those.

“Can we just keep GA4 for historical reference and not load the script?” Yes. An archived GA4 property with no tracking script doesn’t process any new data. It’s just a static dataset. GDPR doesn’t apply to archived, non-growing datasets in the same way — but consult your legal team.

Why We Built Glinto for This Moment

We built Glinto because we couldn’t find an analytics tool designed for European teams managing GDPR compliance. Everything on the market either came from the US (with US-based data processing and surveillance-era design patterns) or was open-source with a self-hosting requirement that most small teams can’t manage.

Glinto is hosted in the EU (Germany and Netherlands), processes no personal data, uses no cookies, and requires no consent banners. Our tracking script is 6 kilobytes. Our dashboard is fast because it reads from D1 (SQLite at the edge), not from a planet-scale analytics pipeline in Oregon.

If you’re migrating off GA4 this month, we’d love to help. The import tool is free. The free plan (one site, 3,000 pageviews/month) doesn’t require a credit card. And our support team is two founders who answer emails within a few hours.

Switching analytics platforms is never going to be the most exciting thing your team does this year. But it might be the most important — for your compliance posture, your page performance, and the trust you signal to every visitor who arrives on your site and sees… nothing. No banner. No popup. Just a fast website that respects them.

That’s what we’re building toward. Join us.