Vemetric Web Analytics Tool Review - Better Than Google Analytics 4?

In the world of web analytics, there are a handful of tools commonly used by companies such as Google Analytics 4, Amplitude, Adobe Analytics, and most recently Piwik Pro. Amongst them, Google Analytics 4 is perhaps the most used to measure and optimize digital performance. And while the other mentioned tools can be considered as alternatives, they are not straightforward choices. Most of them require planning, alignment, and quite an effort to implement—especially Amplitude.

This leads us to ask: are there not alternatives to these tools? Although not many exist, there are some noteworthy ones such as Swetrix and, the tool we are going to be reviewing, Vemetric. We did cover Swetrix in a separate review, which you can explore.

In this assessment, we are going to look at the separate features Vemetric offers and compare them against GA4 in order to see how much ground it covers and showcase any unique features. We will also see if Vemetric can be used for e-commerce tracking, since it is, after all, one of the biggest drivers behind the adoption of GA4 as a web analytics tool.

Vemetric Installation

We’ll kick things off with the installation of Vemetric. The process of installation is straightforward, and they offer many ways to get started. Unlike Google Analytics 4, they do offer two impressive “ways” to initiate their solution:

1. React ecosystem integrations, which include Next.js, React Router, and React.
2. Backend integrations, which include Python SDK, Go SDK, Node SDK, and PHP SDK.

Outside these integrations, you can still install Vemetric using:

• Script Tag
• Google Tag Manager
• NPM package

Just from the installation, we can see that the tool is already offering superior and more advanced ways. It is, in fact, in touch with the reality of web development, accommodating technologies such as React, Next.js, and even Astro. This is not to say that Google Analytics 4 cannot be used to track applications built with these technologies, but you’d need a solid understanding of Virtual Page Views, History Change, and other intricacies of modern web development. However, with Vemetric it is much easier to get started.

For this review, we deployed Vemetric on a React application. To do so, you must:

• Install Vemetric through npm install @vemetric/react.
• Import the Vemetric Component into the application.

import { VemetricScript } from '@vemetric/react';
import { StrictMode } from 'react';
import { createRoot } from 'react-dom/client';
import App from './App.tsx';

createRoot(document.getElementById('root')!).render(
  <StrictMode>
    <VemetricScript token="YOUR_PROJECT_TOKEN" />
    <App />
  </StrictMode>
);

Once added, Vemetric will automatically start tracking page views on your site (each page load will be recorded). You can verify this by checking your Vemetric dashboard for incoming page view events a few seconds after loading a page.

If real-time analytics is not impressive enough, data from localhost will not be tracked. No need for fancy filters like Google Analytics 4. Vemetric tracks real-time out of the box and automatically ignores localhost, while GA4 requires additional filtering rules.

When it comes to installation, Vemetric clearly lowers the barrier to entry for developers. GA4 can achieve the same, but it requires more manual configuration.

Additional Configurations

It is possible to pass different props to the Vemetric component to customize its behavior.

<VemetricScript
  token="YOUR_PROJECT_TOKEN"
  scriptUrl="https://hub.yourdomain.com/main.js"
  host="https://hub.yourdomain.com"
  trackPageViews={true}
  trackOutboundLinks={true}
  trackDataAttributes={true}
  maskPaths={['/project/*', '/project/*/users']}
  onInit={() => {
    console.log('Vemetric initialized');
  }}
/>;

Tracking Events

After installing any analytics platform, the very next thing everyone looks for is event tracking. Events capture user interactions like clicks, purchases, form submissions and enrich your understanding beyond simple page views.

By default, Google Analytics 4 automatically collects a wide set of events, while Vemetric only tracks two: page_view and click (outbound links). If you want to track anything else in Vemetric, you need to implement it manually.

In GA4, there are two ways of tracking events. The first is directly through gtag.js:

gtag('event', 'purchase', {
  transaction_id: 'T12345', 
  value: 100,
  currency: 'CAD'
});

The second way is by using Google Tag Manager. Here the data is sent into the dataLayer, which is simply a structured object. On its own, the dataLayer does not send data anywhere. It only organizes metadata for GTM, which then dispatches it to GA4, Ads, or any other tag you configure.

In Vemetric, event tracking is done with the trackEvent method. You can call it for a simple event, such as a button click:

<button onClick={() => vemetric.trackEvent('purchase')}>
  Purchase Order
</button>

Or you can enrich it with an eventData object that carries parameters, similar to GA4’s gtag event payload:

vemetric.trackEvent('purchase', {
  eventData: {
    transaction_id: 'T12345',
    value: 100,
    currency: 'CAD'
  }
});

Reporting on Events & Custom Event Parameters

Reporting is where the two platforms diverge more clearly. In GA4, parameters must be registered as Custom Dimensions before they can be used in standard reports or in Explorations. This comes with a hard cap of 50 event-scoped custom dimensions per property. The process requires extra setup but unlocks advanced reporting, such as mixing multiple dimensions and metrics together or layering secondary dimensions. Vemetric is more immediate. Event parameters appear by default inside the Events dashboard. Hovering on an event lets you drill into its parameter values, and you can filter by acquisition source or demographics to see who triggered what. The trade-off is that the reporting is fragmented across separate charts and lacks the flexibility to combine dimensions in the same way GA4 allows.

Both tools are fully capable of tracking custom events, but the philosophy is different. GA4 emphasizes flexibility and depth at the cost of setup overhead, while Vemetric prioritizes simplicity and speed-to-insight at the cost of advanced analysis. The right tool depends on what you need most: the power to explore data from every angle, or the ability to capture and view interactions quickly with minimal configuration.

Main Dashboard

The main dashboard of Vemetric is made up of two main sections: a time series chart at the top and a series of tables underneath. At first glance it feels clean and easy to follow, but when you spend time with it you quickly realize that while it covers the essentials, it doesn’t push much further than that.

The time series chart gives you four metrics to work with — users, page views, bounce rate, and visit duration. They’re presented as scorecards you can click on to control what shows in the chart, and on the free plan you can look at the data live, by the hour, or over the last day, week, or month. If you decide to display all four metrics you’ll see them layered as colored lines, which works fine, though the bounce rate and visit duration don’t come with their own y-axis, so you end up with lines floating without much context. It’s a detail, but it makes the chart feel unfinished.

The tables underneath break the reporting into six categories: top pages, top sources, events, countries, and funnels. The top pages table gives you page view counts and users, nothing unusual there. Top sources lets you break traffic down by referrer or by UTM parameters like campaign, medium, or source, which is handy, and you can also switch to referrer type or full referrer URL if you need a closer look. The events table has a bit more to offer since you can not only see counts but also drill into parameters or even look at which users triggered a specific event. Countries is straightforward with a user count by location, though it doubles as a filter for the other tables, which adds some flexibility. Funnels are perhaps the most interesting since you can build them however you like and immediately see conversion and abandonment rates.

As a whole, though, the dashboard doesn’t particularly stand out when put next to Google Analytics 4. It allows for some cross-filtering, which is nice, but the lack of secondary dimensions limits how far you can take your analysis. GA4 might be complex, but its strength lies in layering data points on top of one another to find patterns, and that’s where Vemetric feels thin. A potential improvement here would be adding integrations with data warehouses like Snowflake or BigQuery, giving teams the option to export raw data for more advanced work. Without that, the dashboard remains functional but basic, and in this category Vemetric comes up short.

Funnels & Users Reporting

While the main dashboard may lack some innovation and templatized reports, Vemetric has a couple of nice surprises up its sleeve: the Users and Funnels views. Both of these views can be found in Google Analytics 4 in Exploration reports. We’ll delve into each separately and explain why these are small gems.

Users

In the Users view you will find a table view consisting of the different users that visited your application, their respective country of visit and when they were last seen. Now, there are two categories of users: Anonymous and Identified. Identifying users is another feature the tool allows you to do. In fact, it even allows for user properties, updating user properties, and resetting the tracking for identified users.

When you click on a particular user profile, a profile page loads showing relevant information regarding the user. The page presents different data points including:

• Browser
• Operating System
• Country
• Device Category
• Activity heatmap presenting events captured per day
• Funnel progress
• User timeline activity presenting the user’s events in chronological order

This view is extremely useful from a product analytics perspective as it allows you to investigate profiles in detail and determine common patterns just by skimming. Again, while GA4 allows for such a view, it is more complicated to access and is also scattered across different views being Funnels and User Explorer.

This is a gem because it allows you to see all the relevant data points about behaviour, demographics and conversion points in a single page. This allows for a complete analysis of user profiles empowering UX change studies, A/B test analyses and feature experimentation to the fullest.

Funnels

Funnel reporting in Vemetric is quite impressive. Not only can you see funnel conversion rates from the main dashboard view but you can also have a full report inside a dedicated report. Also, creating funnels is very easy and allows for step refinement which is useful. When creating a step within the funnel you are presented with the following options:

• Step type. You can choose between Page View and Event.
• Refinement Parameters
  • If you chose page view, you can specify:
    • The page path
    • The origin
    • The hash
  • If you chose event, you can specify:
    • The event name
    • Additional relevant parameters

When creating the funnel steps, you can mix the different step types i.e., events with page views.

As for the reasons this is a hidden gem, well, they are two. The first being the ability to see the profiles that completed the funnel. This is extremely handy when studying user profiles, responding to user feedback, using a particular feature or best of all, repeat converters. Having the ability to zoom in on a set of profiles mixed with the ability to identify users and set properties can offer the right mix for GTM teams to start analyzing user profiles based on accounts and different economic regions. In fact, a tech stack including Snitcher (or 6sense) and Vemetric can allow for such analytics to happen easily.

Additional Vemetric Features

Vemetric does have some additional features worth mentioning that do stand out. The first one is the Events view which shows you a timeline (by day) and the respective captured events. Clicking on the individual event will present you with information about the users that triggered the event such as visit duration, browser, device category and so on.

The second feature is Public Dashboard. This allows you to share the main dashboard with the public, allowing others with access to the link to see the data you are working with. In a product analytics setting, you can display the dashboard for your team or even share the dashboard with directors so they can look at the performance by themselves.

The final feature is IP exclusion. With this feature, you can exclude one or several IP addresses which stops Vemetric from collecting data. This can be used to exclude internal traffic outside dev traffic, which is excluded by default.

Vemetric for E-commerce Tracking

With all the information at hand, we can safely say that Vemetric can be used for e-commerce tracking. Although, the tracking would be limited. Checkout funnels, revenue, promotions as well as discounts and refunds are all possible to track but item level reporting just like Google Analytics 4 offers is not possible.

If you need to collect basic data and present simplistic reports, Vemetric can definitely be used as your e-commerce tracking platform of choice. If you need more advanced reporting such as item level reporting for individual product checkout funnels or basket size analysis, it may be too difficult to do. Parts can be done through tracking page views such as item views by measuring page views on product details pages which can still give you some flexibility. If you are planning to use Vemetric for e-commerce, it is highly recommended that you study and understand your reporting needs before choosing the tool.

Conclusion

Vemetric presents itself as a compelling alternative to Google Analytics 4, particularly for teams seeking simplicity over complexity. While it excels in developer-friendly installation, real-time analytics, and streamlined user journey analysis, it trades analytical depth for ease of use. The platform shines for startups and product teams prioritizing quick insights and user behavior understanding, but falls short for enterprises requiring advanced segmentation or detailed e-commerce tracking.

Choose Vemetric if you value simplicity and user-centric analytics; stick with GA4 if you need comprehensive marketing measurement and advanced reporting capabilities.