Choose a stack you will not fight

Choose a stack you will not fight

The analytics market is a swamp of overlapping tools, and the temptation is to buy the most powerful one and grow into it. Resist that. The right stack is the smallest one that answers your measurement plan and that you will genuinely keep maintained, because an analytics tool you do not trust is worse than no tool, since it gives you confident wrong answers instead of honest uncertainty.

For most B2B companies the spine is straightforward. A web analytics layer for traffic and trend (Google Analytics 4 if you want free and ubiquitous, a privacy-first option like Plausible or Fathom if you want simple and clean). A tag manager so you can ship and change tracking without a deploy every time. And, the piece people skip, a product analytics layer (PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel) for what users actually do once they are in your app or funnel. Web analytics tells you about visitors; product analytics tells you about behaviour, and B2B growth lives in behaviour.

Tie it together with a tag manager rather than hand-coding every script into your site. A tag manager (Google Tag Manager is the default) gives you one place to manage tags, triggers and variables, lets non-developers ship a change safely, and keeps your codebase clean. The cost is that it is one more system to govern, so you keep it tidy and documented, which the next chapter is entirely about.

Here is the opinion that saves people the most pain: do not run three tools that all claim to do the same job. One web analytics tool, one product analytics tool, one tag manager, one source of truth for revenue. Redundant tools do not give you a safety net, they give you two numbers that disagree and a weekly argument about which to believe. Pick the canonical tool for each question and make everything else feed it.

Finally, weight your choice toward the tool you will actually keep clean, not the one with the longest feature list. A modest setup that is well-governed and trusted beats an enterprise stack that nobody dares touch. You are choosing a system you have to live with, so choose one you will not fight.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is the exact analytics stack you run today across the portfolio, and what did you deliberately decide NOT to use?

INTERVIEW EWOUD: Where do you land on GA4 versus a privacy-first tool like Plausible for a new B2B site, and why?