Why Significa switched from Plausible to PostHog
Mar 20, 2024
Significa is an award-winning digital-led agency based in the Portuguese city of Porto. Since 2015, Significa has worked with clients such as TFP, for whom it built Dia (a Red Dot Award winner), Zoko (winner of a Good Design Award), and Passaporte Natura 2000 (iF Design award winner).
“We offer a range of services, but we’re design focused,” said Tomás Gouveia, Significa’s Digital Marketer. “We like to think about the product first, assemble a unique strategy, then design bespoke solutions. We don’t use templates. We always design from scratch, and the whole process is customized to the client.”
When it came to web analytics, Significa used to rely on Plausible. But, as the company grew, the team began to find Plausible too simplistic. After less than a year on Plausible, they made the decision to switch to PostHog.
“We knew that PostHog was a much more powerful product and could handle other sorts of analytics,” said Tomás. “When we saw that it also offered web analytics, we decided to switch.”
Web analytics was just the beginning
Web analytics in PostHog is similar to Plausible – it’s centered around a single, clear dashboard that summarizes relevant traffic data – Significa wanted the ability to go deeper.
“We were using Plausible but it doesn’t really have any cool features to analyze data more deeply,” said Tomás. “PostHog, on the other hand, enables us to analyze our traffic in more ways and to set up funnels when we need to.”
Tomás is currently focused on tracking typical user interactions and uses funnel and path insights to see which pages people move through, including their entry and exit points, and form submissions. In the future he envisions using additional tools, such as A/B testing to learn even more.
“We’re planning to deploy different landing pages across the site,” said Tomás. “A/B testing is one of the other features we’re going to start using first, so we can get an idea of what works and what helps us get more leads.”
“PostHog gives me all the same information Plausible used to give us, and a lot more. It’s way more powerful and insightful than Plausible.”
Cookie-less tracking and Google Analytics
Before Plausible, Significa used Google Analytics to track their traffic. While this had the advantage of deep integration with other Google tools, it wasn’t a good fit for Significa’s goals.
“Google Analytics is not intuitive at all and requires you to use cookies across your site,” explained Tomás. “We switched away from it and now the only thing we use from Google is AdWords. Users hate cookie banners, so we prefer not to use any cookies at all — and PostHog is much, much easier to use.”
The toolbar in particular has made PostHog more accessible than other tools, said Tomás. With it, the team can both create new events and also visualize user interactions on a heatmap. The latter is especially useful when dealing with client proposals.
“When we work with a new client we create an online proposal that exists as a private page on our site,” said Tomás. “We send this URL to them and then, because we know it’s only gone to that client, we can see how they interact with the proposal and learn from that.”
“These sorts of insights are really helpful for us, especially when we can also track traffic data and UTM sources too. There’s nothing missing from PostHog for us – it has everything we want. It’s really the perfect platform us.”