AgencyAnalytics Alternative

I used AgencyAnalytics for 2+ years. Here’s why I built something different.

I ran a web agency — not a marketing agency. We built custom websites, maintained client infrastructure, handled support contracts. We managed sites across WordPress, Craft CMS, and ExpressionEngine. When I signed up for AgencyAnalytics, I thought it would give me the client reporting layer I needed.

It did, for the marketing side. AgencyAnalytics is genuinely good at aggregating ad spend, SEO rankings, and social metrics into clean monthly reports. I liked the report generation, and clients found value in those monthly summaries.

But here’s what I couldn’t do: I couldn’t show clients what we were actually doing for them.

The retainer covered code deploys, plugin updates, form monitoring, nightly backups, uptime monitoring, ecommerce support — none of which showed up in AgencyAnalytics. I needed clients to see GitHub commit histories, the number of files we touched each month, the backups we ran nightly, the monitoring we maintained. AgencyAnalytics couldn’t surface any of that because it was never built to.

The form reporting workaround that broke me

The moment I knew I needed something different was when I tried to get form submission reporting into AgencyAnalytics.

AgencyAnalytics has some first-party support for Gravity Forms, but we managed sites across multiple CMS platforms. There was no unified way to report on leads per month across WordPress, Craft CMS, and ExpressionEngine sites.

So I built a workaround: Zapier automations triggered by form webhooks, pushing submissions into Google Sheets, then connecting those Sheets to AgencyAnalytics so the data would finally show up in client dashboards.

It worked, technically. But it was fragile, time-consuming to set up per client, and completely counterintuitive. I was spending hours building plumbing just to answer a basic question: “How many leads did we get this month?”

That’s when the idea for Burrow started forming. Form submissions shouldn’t require a three-tool pipeline. They should just be there — captured natively, broken down by subfields, available the moment you connect the source.

What AgencyAnalytics does well

Credit where it’s due:

• Marketing reporting is their strength. If your agency runs Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and social campaigns, AgencyAnalytics aggregates that data into clean, white-labeled reports. Over 7,000 agencies use it for exactly this purpose.
• Monthly report generation is solid. I genuinely liked the ability to generate branded reports and deliver value to clients on a regular cadence.
• 85+ marketing integrations. For the PPC/SEO/social reporting use case, the connector library is deep.

If your agency’s primary service is marketing campaigns — and you don’t manage codebases, deploy updates, or maintain client infrastructure — AgencyAnalytics is purpose-built for you. Stay with it.

Who should stay with AgencyAnalytics

Keep AgencyAnalytics when:

• Your agency runs ad campaigns and your clients care about ROAS, rankings, and campaign performance
• You don’t manage WordPress plugins, Craft CMS entries, Shopify themes, or custom codebases
• Your team’s core skill is digital marketing, not full-stack web development
• White-label marketing reports are your primary client deliverable
• Per-client billing fits your margin model

When web agencies need something different

The shift happens when you realize your retainer work is invisible.

You’re deploying code weekly, running nightly backups, monitoring uptime, managing plugins across 30 client sites — and none of it shows up in your reporting tool. The client gets a monthly report showing traffic went up 8%, but they have no idea you pushed 47 commits, resolved three form issues, and kept their ecommerce checkout running through a server migration.

That’s the gap. Not a marketing reporting gap — a visibility gap for the actual work web agencies do.

The per-client pricing problem

AgencyAnalytics bills per client. Every new client added to your roster means a pricing calculation: is it worth it? For a development agency with thin margins on maintenance contracts, that per-client cost creates friction. You hesitate before adding smaller clients. You question whether the reporting justifies the spend.

Burrow’s approach is different: everything is included in your plan. No per-client anxiety, no stopping to do math every time you onboard someone. The idea is that reporting on your work shouldn’t come with a tax per client.

The setup tax

Every new client in AgencyAnalytics meant at least an hour of dashboard building — connecting data sources, selecting widgets, configuring templates, and then patching the gaps with Zapier workarounds for anything outside the marketing ecosystem. Multiply that by 20 clients and you’ve burned days on dashboard construction that could have been spent on actual client work.

Burrow ships done-for-you dashboards. Connect GitHub and you instantly get commit history, files touched, and release activity per client. Connect WordPress and you get form submissions with subfield breakdowns. Connect Shopify and you get ecommerce metrics. No templates to wire up, no widgets to drag around, no Zapier automations to maintain.

Client portals that clients actually use

AgencyAnalytics delivers monthly reports. Burrow gives each client their own portal — scoped to their data only — that’s always available. I have clients who check Burrow daily to see their form submissions, development activity, and ecommerce metrics. That’s a fundamentally different relationship than sending a PDF once a month and hoping they read it.

The deeper analytics Burrow unlocks

Beyond just showing that forms are submitting, Burrow lets you build custom reports based on events, tags, and properties within each channel.

Take form submissions as an example. Most tools tell you “you got 47 form submissions this month.” Burrow breaks that down by subfields. If a contact form has a subject dropdown — General Inquiry, Customer Service, Sales Question — your client can see exactly how many submissions came in for each category. They can track whether customer service inquiries are trending up, whether sales questions spike after a campaign launch, or whether a specific form type stopped converting.

That’s the kind of operational depth that turns a reporting tool from “nice to have” into something clients log into every day.

The bottom line

Burrow is the AgencyAnalytics for web agencies focused on maintenance and support contracts.

AgencyAnalytics answers “how are the campaigns performing?” Burrow answers “what is our agency actually doing for this client, and is everything running?” If your work is ad campaigns, stay with AgencyAnalytics. If your work is code, infrastructure, and client site management — Burrow was built because that work deserves the same visibility.

Client portals | Client reporting | Ecommerce operations | See all integrations