Upgrading From GA
Moving to Ringside from Google Analytics
Honest, practical advice for those thinking of taking the next step with their analytics and attribution.
What you’d have by next month
One number, that agrees with the system that recorded the sale
Ringside anchors to whatever system actually recorded the sale: your order system if you sell online, your CRM if the deal closes later on. Every platform’s claim gets reconciled against it, so each sale is counted once. On ecommerce we tend to land within 1% of your own order records, and in practice it’s usually tighter.
If you’ve ever spent a morning working out why two systems disagree about yesterday, that’s the morning you’re getting back.
The sale that happens somewhere else
An enquiry becomes a phone call, then an appointment, then a contract. A product gets researched online and bought in your shop. Ringside carries an identifier through into your CRM or your till and pulls the outcome back, so the marketing that started it gets the credit when it needs to.
Every visit counted rather than estimated
When someone declines your cookie banner, or leaves without touching it, their activity is still counted. Nobody’s tracked or identified, but the visits, the events and the sales are recorded as they happen.
GA models that group using the behaviour of the people who did consent, and below a certain volume of traffic it doesn’t model them at all. Counted and modelled are different numbers, and only one of them tells you what a campaign actually did.
Journeys that don’t expire
GA attributes inside a lookback window. Key events can be set to 30, 60 or 90 days, and 90 is as far back as it goes.
Ringside has no lookback limit. A deal that closes six months after the first click still credits the campaign that started it.
If you sell products, margin next to revenue
Channel, campaign, ad, product. So the campaign at the top of your report is the one that made you the most, not the one that took the most, and MOAS catches the one with a healthy ROAS and negative contribution.
We build it from your cost data at SKU and variant level. Where a cost is missing we estimate it and label the estimate.
A briefing in your inbox every morning
Ringside also writes the morning email: what happened yesterday, why, and what’s worth doing about it, in plain English, sent to whoever wants it at whatever cadence suits them. It needs nobody to log in to anything, which makes it the part of the product half your business will actually use. See a sample →
All of it unsampled, and yours to build on
Everything Ringside collects is available to you, raw and aggregated, not just the tidied-up version in the dashboard. And there’s no sampling anywhere in it.
So your analyst can rebuild any number we show you, your BI tool can point straight at it, and nothing is locked behind our interface. If you ever leave, it comes with you. Data access →
What keeping GA costs
Staying put feels free, and mostly it is. The cost turns up in the decisions.
A campaign gets cut because last click starved it of credit. Budget moves because the model said so and nobody can see why. A month’s Shopping revenue drops and it takes three weeks to find out it was a feed problem rather than a bidding one. The board sees a number that doesn’t match the one finance has, and somebody spends a morning explaining the gap instead of doing anything about it.
None of that shows up as a line item. It shows up as spend that went to the wrong place, and as time spent reconciling numbers instead of acting on them.
A model you can see inside
In November 2023 Google removed first click, linear, time decay and position-based from GA, so what’s left is data-driven attribution or last click.
Google explains the broad approach behind data-driven attribution: it weighs things like the gap between an interaction and the conversion, the format, and other signals. What it doesn’t give you is why a particular visit got a particular amount of credit. So when somebody at a board meeting asks why paid social dropped, the honest answer available to you is that the model decided.
Ringside runs one model, trained on your data, and we’ll explain the working: the factors it weighs, what each contributes, and why any visit in any journey got the credit it did. First and last click sit alongside it whenever you want to compare.
You don’t build any of it
One line in the head of your pages, or a custom pixel on Shopify. A couple of DNS records. One extra field on your lead form if you’re joining to a CRM.
We build the events, connect your platforms, and manage connections. Most sites are live within a week. When your site gets rebuilt or you open a new market or you want something tracked that isn’t yet, you ask and we do it. No change request, no quote, no project.
That’s the real difference between this and extending GA. Everything above can be approximated with enough tooling and enough of somebody’s time. The version most teams end up with is GA, a tag manager, a Looker Studio report, an export, and one person holding it together. We build it, run it and fix it when something breaks. A change to your site doesn’t become your next big project.
Keep Google Analytics running
Sure, go for it. Plenty of our clients still do, and there’s no conflict: different tag, different data, side by side for as long as you like.
That also handles the two things people worry about most. Your team’s GA knowledge doesn’t go anywhere, because GA doesn’t go anywhere. And the native Google links keep working, while Ringside pushes conversions and modelled values back into your ad platforms on top, so the bidding optimises on outcomes rather than on whatever fired last.
There are things GA does that we don’t. It’s free. It’s the tool every agency and every new hire already knows. And if what you need is which pages got traffic and where it came from, GA answers that perfectly well and there’s no reason to pay anyone for it.
If your turnover doesn’t justify it, or your media spend is small enough that paying for Ringside becomes a meaningful share of it, keep GA and save your money. We’d rather say that now than have you leave in month four.
Questions
Do we have to turn GA off?
No, and most people don’t at first. Run both, compare them, talk to us.
Why don’t your numbers match GA’s?
Because the two tools collect differently, attribute on different windows and treat consent differently. GA measures sessions on your site and models the visitors it couldn’t track. Ringside counts the activity itself and reconciles against your order system or your CRM. Both views sit side by side in our dashboard, and we’ll walk you through any gap you want explained.
Isn’t this just multi-touch attribution?
Attribution is part of it. The part that’s harder to buy elsewhere is the join to what happened after the click, and the margin on what sold.
We’ve already built something like this on our warehouse.
Plenty of people have. The question is who owns it when the site changes, a connection breaks or somebody asks for something new? What you’re buying here is that maintaining it is our job (connecting all your data sources, normalising them all into the same views, currencies, timezones), and that new questions don’t turn into a six-week project.
Do we lose our history?
Ringside starts collecting the day it goes live. Where we can bring historical data across from your existing systems we will, and we’ll tell you what’s possible for your setup before you commit to anything.
Can we keep using our own reporting?
Yes. The raw and aggregated data is yours, queryable directly or connected to whatever you already use. Data access →
What about privacy?
We don’t collect IP addresses, names, email addresses or phone numbers, and your data is hosted in the EU. Privacy, consent and cookies →
How long before it’s useful?
Live within a week, and attribution needs a good few weeks of collection after that before the numbers mean anything. That’s true of every tool in this category.
Bring us the questions you can’t currently answer
We’ll walk you through the platform with real data in it and show you the screens that answer them.
If GA already gets you there, we’ll say so.