Google Ads still dominates though, and if you're doing paid advertising - you're not just shooting yourself in the foot, but you're lopping off a limb - or two. I wish it wasn't the case.
Any non-Google analytics options integrate well with Google Ads, especially for retargeting?
For retargeting you would probably have to have the DoubleClick code on your site nonetheless. But at least serving European users you would only be able to activate it after a clear opt in via a consent manager.
Using marketing parameters (like utm-... in GA or Matomo) or the likes in any other tool still gives you clear marketing performance metrics in your analytics solution of choice, though.
And a lot of "pure" tracking tools would - at least currently - not fall under the opt in rules of thew GDPR. But the moment you link them with your advertising profiles (like in GA with the DoubleClick integration) your whole tracking setup also becomes opt in. So you would probably loose at least some share of your traffic in analytics and not be able to clearly do marketing analysis any more. At least not as exact as before.
I had clients loosing 80% of their traffic stats in analytics after shifting to opt in.
Take a look at Adobe's Experience Platform. Adobe Analytics is great. We take the experience events and profile events and build a unified profile upon which you can build segments used for targeting in Adobe's Advertising Cloud, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target, and Adobe Experience Manager, and probably more...
The Advertising Cloud is integrated with many third-party advertisers.
I'm just a software engineer, though. We probably demand an extremely high price.
Any non-Google analytics options integrate well with Google Ads, especially for retargeting?