The current state of web analytics
Otus has recently gone live, so we thought it would be a good moment to share what we are building and why.
We are Stefan and Ilias. Stefan is a full stack software engineer with a background in technical web analytics, and I am a technical web analyst with a background in online marketing. Between the two of us we have worked in web analytics for over 15 years, and in that time we have seen the field change a lot. Both commercially as on the privacy side. Consent requirements got stricter, browsers started blocking more and more, and the ad platforms started pushing server side tracking, which most smaller businesses simply do not have the setup for.
Most of that time we spent inside other people's analytics setups. The data was usually there, but getting a straight answer out of it was another story. More often than not the reports went unread, or somebody exported everything to a spreadsheet to find out how their last campaign actually performed.
Since we both have a real passion for this field we started looking at what is actually out there for smaller European businesses and personal websites. We quickly found that larger enterprises have access to tools with commercially very interesting features, both from the EU as well as outside. For smaller businesses the space is mainly focused on privacy above feature set. Features alike ecommerce tracking, dashboards built for different scopes, conversion forwarding, a way to interpret and even converse with your data using AI, all of it fully EU sovereign on European providers and open source tooling.
We do not think any of that should stay gated behind enterprise pricing, and we do not think you should have to give up privacy to get it. That is why we are now building Otus Analytics.
How Otus works
By default Otus tracks visitors without cookies, which means that for most websites a consent banner is not needed at all. Sessions are calculated server side with a daily rotating secret identifier, and IP addresses are only used to look up the country and are discarded right after, so they are not stored or anonymised at a later stage.
For returning visitor metrics you can switch to full tracking mode. In that case the consent obligations that come with it apply as well, and we believe that is a choice the website owner should make, not be forced by the tool they choose.
Everything runs on European infrastructure, and that includes the AI. Every week the AI Analyst sends you a briefing on what changed on your website and what is worth looking into. You can also ask it questions about your own data, like chatting with a colleague. For this we use an European AI model, since sending your data to an American model would not fit with what we are building. Besides, Europe is building very capable models at the moment, so the choice was not a difficult one.
Conversions are forwarded server side to Google Ads, Meta and TikTok. That way you can still drive your advertising, without a browser pixel on your website that might be collecting things you never asked for. In an ideal world nothing is sent to advertiseing platforms, but that is simply how most business drive sales these days.
Not an anti-American project
We are not building Otus Analytics because we think American companies are the bad guys. A lot of them make excellent software, which we have used for years and in some cases still use.
However, we believe Europe deserves tools that start from a different philosophy. A lot of tools collect as much as they can legally defend, and others collect as little as possible (which we have a lot of respect for), but with that latter group you lose features like conversion forwarding or the option to use full tracking when your business needs it. With Otus you keep those options, while privacy is still the default.
We also think analytics has become too much a field for specialists over the last decade. For someone who runs a business and just wants to know whether last month went well and why, having super complicated tools are not helpful. Otus should be easy to set up and to understand for everyone, and still offer enough for the people who want to go more in depth.
Where we are now
We are live!
The core of the product is there and we are activly working on the UX, together with the people who are using it. If you would like to see what it looks like before signing up, have a look around the sandbox.
If you want to try it on your own website, you can start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. And if you have feedback, mail us at info@otusanalytics.com. We would love to hear from you!