I run SEO across a portfolio of sites — a few Roblox game guides, a couple of finance tools, an AI tool directory. Not a traditional agency, but the reporting headache is the same one agencies have: too many properties, never enough hours to open each dashboard one by one.
For most of last year I rotated between two tools to handle this. Neither one stuck. Here's the unglamorous version of why, in case you're weighing the same two.
AgencyAnalytics: clean dashboards, then the per-site math hits
AgencyAnalytics is genuinely nice to look at. Client-ready PDFs, white-label, the GSC and GA4 connectors mostly just work. If you manage five client sites and bill for reports, it earns its keep.
My problem was the pricing model. It scales by campaign/site, and once you're past a handful of properties the monthly number starts looking less like a tool and more like a salary line. I wasn't sending these reports to a paying client — I was the client. Paying agency-tier per-site fees to look at my own sites felt backwards.
The other thing nobody warns you about: the dashboards are great at showing you what the numbers are, and not great at telling you which site to go fix first. I'd open it, see twelve green-ish widgets, and still not know where my afternoon should go.
Looker Studio: free, but you pay in assembly time
So I went the other way — Looker Studio, free, connect everything, build my own. Which works, technically.
The tax is your weekends. Every new site means re-wiring data sources, blending GSC with GA4, fixing the connector that silently stopped refreshing, rebuilding the same template because copy-paste across reports never quite carries over. I spent more time maintaining the report than acting on it. And the moment I added site number fifteen, load times turned the whole thing into a loading-spinner museum.
Free isn't free when the upkeep is a part-time job.
What I actually wanted
Looking back, the thing I needed wasn't prettier charts or more connectors. It was a layer on top that looks at all the sites at once and says: this one dropped, that one's a quick win, ignore the rest today. Prioritization, not presentation.
I ended up writing up the comparison properly while shopping for that — an honest AgencyAnalytics alternative breakdown for people who balk at the per-site price, and a separate Looker Studio alternative one for the DIY crowd who are tired of being their own data engineer.
If you're running more than a few sites and your reporting tool can't answer "what do I fix today," you're probably feeling the same gap I was. Curious what other multi-site operators landed on — drop yours below.
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