So at first glance, this looks like it’s a hot new alternative to Google Analytics, you can see as I scroll through the page here, I’ll get great looking analytics. I’ll be able to understand my users, get real time visitor analytics. I can even do things like record sessions and do heat map tracking. That sounds fantastic. I’m in. What was this up here? Never sell your data. You own it. How can I? Oh, let’s look at the URL, says Analytics.

That client dotcom client AMP is the company that I work for. Wait a minute. What is this? This is 66Analytics. It’s self hosted analytics. In fact, I can even turn this into my own SAS because they allow you to create plans and have users sign up right from your own website. Here are the plans they create for from a default. Wow, this sounds amazing. Stay tuned. Hey, what’s up, guys, Dave here from Practical Tools, where I review software to help you grow your business.

Today, I’m taking a look at 66Analytics a real true to life Google Analytics alternative. Now, why would you want to self host when Google Analytics is everywhere? Well, quite frankly, our data is getting absorbed by these giant corporations. They’re profiting from them. And maybe you have a business that needs to be more private. You don’t want Google to have access to it. Well, you can now still understand the activities of your users without sharing it with one of the biggest corporations in the world.

And that is the point of 66Analytics now right out of the gate. What I recommend to everybody only use self hosted analytics. Of course not. Let’s not be silly. Google Analytics is a great product, but it’s nice to know what is out there. And if you are a little bit more cautious about the privacy of visitors of your website, know that you can still understand their actions on your site and not have to share it with everybody. All right.

That said, let’s get into this application. I’m going to hop over here to the dashboard and this is what it looks like the first time you log in. Now, I will say that you do need to install this. They can install it for you for a very small fee, or I have a bonus video showing you how to do the installation. It really only takes about 10 or 15 minutes, depending on your level of expertize, setting up these types of things.

But I go through it every step of the way. That video is going to be exclusive to the Facebook group, so it’ll be linked down below. Click on that. Join the group. I try to approve everybody very, very quickly. You’ll be able to get in and watch that video if you want to learn how to set up 66Analytics. All right. Let’s get into it now. I’m going to show you how to set up a new website and all of the features on the back end.

But to give you a nice overview of how the application works, I’m actually using the 66Analytics demo site right now to give you a little tour because they’ve already got it populated with a lot of analytical data. Now, the first thing you might want to note is right up here, we have a little dropdown selector where we can choose between the sites that we are managing now. It is possible to create teams and those teams can have access to only a particular number of websites.

So if you want of clients accessing their own sites, but not other people’s sites, you can definitely set that up. All right. So now that that’s out of the way, we’ll actually get into that a little bit further. Let me give you a tour of all of the different options here. We’ve got real time reporting. We can see who is actually on the website right now. You’ll be able to see what country they’re in, what device they’re using and what pages they’re on.

But you will not be able to see their IP address that is kept private for the whole reason that you might do self hosted analytics. All right. The next section is the visitors. This is going to be more of like a report where you can see visitors over time. In fact, we can set a date range up here. We can do some filtering if you’d like, add filters like countries, screen resolution, browser language devices. So you’ll be able to track who’s accessing your website from, say, iOS versus maybe Windows or something like that.

All right. Then down below here, we’ve got heat maps. They’re collecting data right now on the heat maps. We can get into that in a little bit. We also have replays now. This feature is in beta, as you can see right here. They say it’s pretty heavy on the server. So we’ll see how that fares. The next section down is websites where you can view and manage all of the added websites that you have permission to see from this page.

You can get a nice overview of what’s going on in your websites, how many page views there have been, how many visitors there have been, if the tracking code is active, if it’s not, you can grab the tracking code right here. If you want to edit the website, you can do that or even just remove the property altogether. The next section down is where we have teams. This is where you can set up those user permissions and in fact, you can even do this on a client level.

So if I were your client on your installation of 66Analytics, I would be able to set up my own team and restrict people from accessing different pages. This is not in the admin panel where we can set up the users, and I’ll show you that in a little bit. So from a user point of view, they can set multiple websites up and have restrictions on their own and really, really cool features here. So I can create a team, name that team and then say which websites it has access to.

Then down below here, of course, we have the help section. This is built in. So of course, if you’re on your own website, there is help documents built right in for your users. So they’re not always going to bug you. They’ll be able to go and check out, oh, how do I add this to my site? How do I install the script? How can it verify it step by step directions for your user?

So really thinking of this as a SaaS platform in a box, I think it’s a really creative idea. All right, enough talk. Let’s actually set up a website. So I’m going to go here and click add website. We’ll start tracking profitable tools. The website is profitable. That tools have some options here. We can track visitor events and do a session replace. Let’s submit a new website created. And here’s my tracking code. I’ll just copy this and I need to install it in the head of my website.

So I’m using Astra on my website. I’ve got Astra pro installed and I’m using the custom layout option. Now you can use any header or footer plugin you’re used to using if you’re using WordPress, WordPress, if you’re on something like Shopify or Wick’s, you probably know how to inject code into your website or inside of Astra custom layouts. I’m going to go to the hook section. The action will be in the WP head. And then display this on all pages, the entire website.

Let’s go ahead and publish this. All right. My custom layout is published and even without reloading, it can already see that it’s active on the 66Analytics installation. All right. So I’ve got the tracking code installed on my website. I’m going to let the data accumulate a little bit here. And let’s go ahead and check out some more features over here. We’ve got heat maps now. What a heat map is, is a cumulative look at how people are using your website.

So you’ll get a screenshot of your website. And you can see based on a color code of really hot areas where people are clicking or tapping, a lot will turn red. Other areas that people don’t even load might be blue. All right. So let’s see how easy it is to set up a heat map. Big blue button here. Click that and let’s go ahead and name this. I’m going to call this home. I’m just going to leave it as the root path.

But I could put in a specific website here if I want. Of course, it has to be on the site that we’re currently tracking. Let’s create and the heat map is created. Now, a nice touch here is that they give you a separate screen for both desktop, tablet and mobile, yet individual ones. So because obviously people are going to be hitting different areas of the screen depending on what device they are on. All right. So let’s go ahead and let that kind of accumulate here for a little bit.

I don’t know if I’ll get any data out of it before the end, but let’s check out the next feature, which is replays. And you can see I’ve already got four replays recorded here. So we’ve got one from Indonesia, three from the United States. I do notice that I can’t see what part of the United States people are coming from. I think that would be a really nice thing. Let’s see, this Indonesian one is only eight seconds.

Let’s go for a little bit longer on here is a minute and 17 seconds, you know. Let’s try this. Twenty eight second. And that’s a good length for this video. Let’s replay the session. So this is an actual user on the website and what they’re doing. So this person click the newsletter option and it looks like we want to show anyone’s information there. So we’ll go ahead and move off of that. But I would actually be able to see them typing in their email address in a second.

I don’t want to share that, obviously on YouTube, but that is a really powerful feature. Now, heat maps and screen recordings are very different because a screen recording is going to be one user using the website and you can see how they interact with things. But a heat map, on the other hand, that’s going to be accumulation of everybody. And so you can get a better idea for maybe some overall themes for how things are breaking, but in individual screen recordings can be helpful as well.

So it’s great to have both of those built in here. Let’s go ahead and check out the real time data that we’ve got going on. No one currently active on the website. I just installed that pixel a few minutes ago and then we can also check out the visitors. This will give us a look at everybody. It’s going be the same people that we’ve seen in the last screen where we saw the screen recordings only. This is just their analytical data that we’ve recorded.

So to people on Windows, to people on OS 10, you can see their screen resolution. So we had someone on a very large screen here. We’ve got a couple more normal sized screens and we again see what part of the world they’re coming from, but no real drilling down. We’re just getting, you know, what country they’re from, not basic localities. I’ve seen that even with with chat applications, they’ll tell you what city people are in.

It can get a little bit freaky in terms of privacy. The amount of data that you can get out of simply visiting a website can be quite alarming. Over on the dashboard, we get a pretty nice overview of all of the traffic on your website. Now, this is a timeline of events. So obviously you have only got the one day here. But over time, this will fill out to be a nice line graph. Then we’ve also got some overviews of the most popular pages, top referrers countries, UTM.

So if I’m using UTM, I’ll be able to track them right from this screen. That is a really nice touch screen. Resolution’s browser, languages, browsers, looks like everybody’s on Chrome desktops and then the operating systems that people are using. So again, nice, simple, clean analytics, helpful information, but it’s not going to invade anyone’s privacy. All right. We’re starting to get some more data into the website here about what we’re going to do next is look at some of the options from the administrative point of view, how you can set up plans and actually charge people to use this service to get there.

We’re going to go up to the upper right hand corner where we can see our user account and then just choose admin. This is going to take us to the admin dashboard. This is basically where we can get a bird’s eye view of our analytics business. This is the administration dashboard where we can see how many new websites have signed up, how many new users we have. You know, really everything you need to know from a business point of view, how are things progressing or are we growing or shrinking?

Then there’s actually related to this entire analytics page about the analytics business. Can’t really get more meta than that. Right. So we can see the overall growth year website events and some other like form submissions, basically how onboarding is going and things like that. Clicks scroll events, basically analytics of your analytics. I suppose you could install this again to track this website if you wanted. All right. So those are that’s the data you have as a business owner.

You can also get a bird’s eye view of all of the users and all of the websites that you’re currently managing. So this will be across the entire account. If you have hundreds of websites that are signed up, you’d be able to see them all from the screen right here. There is a search. Fox, which is important, then we can also create pages now. I went ahead and just tested this out, we can create categories as well as pages inside of those categories so that you can have extra data up on your website.

Now, to add a new page, it’s quite easy. You just hit the page button up here. You can choose between internal links, which will live right on your analytics website, or you can link out if you have a mean website you prefer to keep the data on. You can enter in a slug up here, a page title. And then it’s basically just the tiny editor that you’re used to seeing inside of WordPress, where you’d be able to enter in some basic information like, you know, copy, you know, words as well as images and embed videos.

That all works really well. I did test that out. Under plans. You can set up how you want to build people by default. They give you a free and trail plan. You’ll definitely want to customize that. Creating a plan is quite simple and surprisingly flexible. You can give the plan a title here and decide whether you want to enable or disable able it. You can have different pricing for monthly and annual. You can also list how many websites the plan can manage, whether it’s one three five infinity.

You can set that up. You can put limits for just about everything. How many page views people are going to get, how many screen recordings they can have, how many heat maps they can have. You can have that all set up down here really, really nice. And you can also turn on ads if you want if you want to have some some ads running on your clients pages, you can do that as well. Now, I do need to clarify that you can’t accept payments unless you have the extended license of 66Analytics and it’s substantially more expensive.

Now, I have the regular license, so I won’t be able to show you the billing features, but know that it does integrate with Stripe and PayPal. In fact, I can show you where you set that up. It’s under website settings. Here is where you are payments and you can see that I need that extended license in order to activate the payment system. But I can see the features here and it does integrate with with PayPal as well as straight.

And then you’ll be able to accept billing for those plans that you configured on the previous screen. Still under website settings. This is where we can really configure the look and feel the website. Right now, it’s set up to be 66Analytics, but let’s go ahead and change that. All right. I’ll change the website title to see analytics. I can set the default language here. I’m fine with English. Let’s go ahead, upload our logo. We can add our own favor, can set the default time zone for users.

We can turn on registration emails and even have a custom landing page if we want. Here’s where you can enter your terms and conditions and your privacy policy. Maybe you want to create those on your mean website and just link up to them. All right. So I can see right away that my WPvivid can as well as my logo have been updated and they look pretty nice. The default color scheme actually works quite well with my logo, so I’m happy with that.

We’ve already checked out the payment sections. Let’s go on to the business details. This is where we can set up invoices, if we like, of note. You can turn on invoicing. Even if you’re not using their payment system, you just have to find another way to pay you under analytics. We can enable or disable the session replays. Those are the recordings. And all this is more strenuous on your server. So if you’re running into issues, you might want to disable this.

You can also set up Google reCAPTCHA so that, you know, you’re not getting a lot of spam submissions. We can allow Facebook logins. If you want to set that up under the ad section, you can insert some ads in the header and the footer link up to your social media profiles and then add your own SMTP client. So you make sure your emails actually hit the inbox of your users at any custom JavaScript or sites. As you might want.

You inject something like a Facebook tracking pixel or Google Analytics. Now, you probably want to put like chat here, right? So people if you want to get support, you could add your your chat box right here and then you can set up the email notifications that go out. This will be for you when new users get signed up, when your payments are received. And then this last section is for Crohn’s. Now, this is something I’m going to cover in the bonus video, which is going to be linked below over in the Facebook group.

We’re actually show you how to set this thing up. All right. Before we go, let’s give it one more look here. You can see we’ve got six page views and nine visitors. In the few minutes since we’ve set this up, we’re getting people from all over the world, Canada, Singapore, Indonesia and the United Kingdom. So that’s really great to see. Of course, some visitors from the United States as well. We can go ahead and check the maps here.

Now, typically, this takes several days to populate, so maybe I’ll just pop over to the demo site and show it on. Looks like yet still says looking for data. So here’s one over on their demo website that I can see has enough data to look at. It’s turned blue, whereas the other ones are great out. Lets go ahead and click on this. And this is the mobile phone version. So I can see that some people are clicking on pricing like someone missed the demo button and maybe tapped right below.

That didn’t trigger. Quite right. Right. Scroll down. There’s someone tapping on this. Be good example of oh, a lot of people are tapping on this for some reason. Maybe they think that you should be able to click on that section. So there you go. This only has eight clicks tracked on it. Typically, you’d want this to run for a much longer duration of time so you could gather hundreds of clicks and really start to make some sense out of the data.

But that is what heat maps are all about. So, of course, you should consider 66Analytics if privacy is a top concern for you or your clients. But you should also consider if you just need a nice, clean, simple, easy to understand interface for analytics. I know a lot of business owners. Get overwhelmed by Google Analytics. There’s too much available and it’s too complicated to find the information that you need now I think it has gotten better in time, but I find myself really enjoying using this platform.

And I could see a lot of business owners feeling the same way. I get messages all the time about how confusing their dashboards are. So I think this is a really solid product and it’s got maybe a wider scope of use than I initially thought. I’m going to go ahead and give this one eight nine point on. It’s going to do it for this video, of course, the link to grab 66Analytics will be down in the description and that’ll be our referral link for the channel.

So if you click, it will cost you anything extra. But we do receive a commission on the back end. If you go ahead and make a purchase. They have any questions. Of course. Leave a comment down below and you can always find me in. The Facebook group will also link to that as well. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next review.