How to choose an analytics tool for an extension or a website

Every analytics tool will show you a chart of visitors. The differences that matter are underneath: what it collects to draw that chart, where it keeps it, who else can see it, and what it obliges you to tell your users and the stores. This article is a checklist for choosing, whatever you end up with. Work through it with each tool's own documentation open.

1. Can it answer your questions?

Write down the five or six questions you need answered before looking at features. For most products they are some of these:

• How many people use it, per day, week and month?
• Which features or pages do they use?
• Do people come back, and how long do they stay?
• Where do new users come from?
• For an extension: how many install, and how many uninstall?
• Did the last release help or hurt?

A tool that answers all of them with less data is better than one that answers them with more. Anything beyond your list is something you will collect, disclose and protect without using.

2. What does it collect?

Ask for the complete list, not the marketing summary.

• Identifiers. Is there a per-person identifier? Is it random, or derived from the device (fingerprinting)? Is it scoped to your product, or shared across sites?
• The IP address. Is it stored, logged, or used and discarded?
• Page addresses. Are full URLs with query strings recorded? Query strings often carry email addresses and tokens.
• Device details. Browser and operating system families, or exact versions and screen sizes?
• What is captured automatically. Clicks, form fields, session recordings? Each is data you must disclose.

3. Where does the data live, and for how long?

• Location. Which country hosts the data? Does that matter to your users, or to your own obligations?
• Retention. How long are raw events kept? Can you shorten it? Are aggregated totals kept after the raw data is deleted, so you keep your history without keeping the detail?
• Deletion. Can you delete a project, and does that remove everything, including backups within a stated time?

4. Who can see it?

• Your team. Roles, so not everyone can change settings or see everything.
• The provider. Does it use your data for anything else, such as advertising or training? Read its terms, not only its privacy page.
• The public. Shareable public dashboards are convenient and easy to forget about.

5. For an extension: does it work in Manifest V3?

Browser extensions add constraints a website does not have:

• No remote code. The tool must be a bundled library, or accept plain HTTP requests. A loader that fetches a script from a server is rejected by both Chrome and Firefox.
• The service worker stops when idle. The tool must queue events in storage and survive restarts without losing or duplicating them.
• Permissions. It should not need broad host permissions; ideally only storage.
• Uninstall tracking, including Firefox's need to set the address on every start.
• Firefox's built-in consent: it must read technicalAndInteraction and send nothing when it is declined.

How to add analytics to a Manifest V3 extension covers each of these.

6. What will you have to declare?

Everything the tool collects becomes something you declare:

• Chrome Web Store: the data types on the privacy practices tab, and three certifications.
• Firefox: data_collection_permissions in the manifest.
• Your privacy policy, which must agree with both.
• On a website in Europe, possibly a consent banner, depending on what the tool stores on the visitor's device.

A tool that collects less gives you shorter, simpler answers. Draft them before you choose: if the answers for one tool make you uncomfortable, that is information.

7. Does it respect your users' choices?

• Does it honour an opt-out you build into your product?
• Does it honour browser signals such as Global Privacy Control?
• On Firefox, does it honour the built-in consent?
• When someone opts out, does it send nothing at all, or does it keep sending "anonymised" data?

8. Can you leave?

• Can you export your data, raw and aggregated, in an open format?
• Is the SDK an ordinary package you can remove in an afternoon?
• What happens to your data if you cancel?

9. What does it cost as you grow?

• What is the pricing based on: events, visitors, seats, projects?
• What happens over the limit: data dropped, a surprise bill, or a warning?
• Is there a free tier that fits a small product, and what does it cost in data rather than money?

Scoring the answers

Put each candidate's answers side by side, against your own questions from step 1. Prefer the tool that answers your questions while collecting least, keeping data shortest, and creating the fewest obligations. Convenience features matter less than they look on a pricing page.

Common questions

On your own servers, or a hosted service?

Running analytics on your own servers keeps the data where you control it, and makes you responsible for running, securing, updating and backing them up. A hosted service does that for you, so where it keeps the data, and what it may do with it, become the questions to ask.

Should I run two tools at once?

Only briefly. Running both for a few weeks while switching lets you compare trends. For longer, it doubles what you collect, what you disclose and what can go wrong.

Why do two tools show different numbers?

They count differently: what counts as a visitor, how bots are filtered, what happens when someone declines consent or clears storage. Compare trends between tools, not totals.

How long should a trial take?

Long enough to see a full week and a release: two to four weeks. Short trials show the setup experience, not whether the reports answer your questions.

How AnalyticsTrend does it

AnalyticsTrend was built to come out well on this list:

• Collects: events you name, a random identifier scoped to your product, a country and sometimes a region worked out from the IP address before it is discarded, and browser, operating system and device families. On websites, the referring hostname and campaign parameters. No cookies, no fingerprinting.
• Keeps: raw events for 90 days, daily totals after that, hosted in Canada.
• Shares: with your account's members, by role. No public links.
• Extensions: a bundled package for Manifest V3, with a stored queue, uninstall tracking that works on Firefox, the storage permission only, and Firefox's consent honoured.
• Choices: your own consent switch and Global Privacy Control.

The full list is in What it collects, what the stores need is in Store policy and privacy, and plans are on the pricing page.

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Written 7 October 2026. Check each tool's current documentation before deciding.