I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content.
Same!
We’ve got click rates, impressions, conversion rates, open rates, ROAS, pageviews, bounces rates, ROI, CPM, CPC, impression share, average position, sessions, channels, landing pages, KPI after never ending KPI.
That’d be fine if all this shit meant something and we knew how to interpret it. But it doesn’t and we don’t.
The reality is much simpler, and therefore much more complex. Most of us don’t understand how data is collected, how these mechanisms work and most importantly where and how they don’t work.
Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.
Prompted by my post on tracking, Chris does some soul searching about his own use of tracking.
I’m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising.
He brings up the point that advertisers expect to know how many people opened a particular email and how many people clicked on a particular link. I’m sure that’s right, but it’s also beside the point: what matters is how the receiver of the email feels about having that information tracked. If they haven’t given you permission to do it, you can’t just assume they’re okay with it.
I’ve been reading the excellent Design For Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog. There was a line that really stood out to me:
The idea that it’s alright to do whatever unethical thing is currently the industry norm is widespread in tech, and dangerous.
It stood out to me because I had been thinking about certain practices that are widespread, accepted, and yet strike me as deeply problematic. These practices involve tracking users.
The first problem is that even the terminology I’m using would be rejected. When you track users on your website, it’s called analytics. Or maybe it’s stats. If you track users on a large enough scale, I guess you get to just call it data.
Those words—“analytics”, “stats”, and “data”—are often used when the more accurate word would be “tracking.”
Or to put it another way; analytics, stats, data, numbers …these are all outputs. But what produced these outputs? Tracking.
Here’s a concrete example: email newsletters.
Do you have numbers on how many people opened a particular newsletter? Do you have numbers on how many people clicked a particular link?
You can call it data, or stats, or analytics, but make no mistake, that’s tracking.
Follow-on question: do you honestly think that everyone who opens a newsletter or clicks on a link in a newsletter has given their informed constent to be tracked by you?
You may well answer that this is a widespread—nay, universal—practice. Well yes, but a) that’s not what I asked, and b) see the above quote from Design For Safety.
You could quite correctly point out that this tracking is out of your hands. Your newsletter provider—probably Mailchimp—does this by default. So if the tracking is happening anyway, why not take a look at those numbers?
But that’s like saying it’s okay to eat battery-farmed chicken as long as you’re not breeding the chickens yourself.
When I try to argue against this kind of tracking from an ethical standpoint, I get a frosty reception. I might have better luck battling numbers with numbers. Increasing numbers of users are taking steps to prevent tracking. I had a plug-in installed in my mail client—Apple Mail—to prevent tracking. Now I don’t even need the plug-in. Apple have built it into the app. That should tell you something. It reminds me of when browsers had to introduce pop-up blocking.
If the outputs generated by tracking turn out to be inaccurate, then shouldn’t they lose their status?
But that line of reasoning shouldn’t even by necessary. We shouldn’t stop tracking users because it’s inaccurate. We should stop stop tracking users because it’s wrong.
Your attentive kindness doesn’t get picked up by any analytical tool I’ve got other than my heart and my memory—however short lived.
A deep dive into GDPR.
Got Google Analytics on your site? You should probably read this.
A round-up of alternatives to Google Analytics.
Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.
I wish more companies would realise that this is a perfectly reasonable approach to take:
We decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. 🤔
So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services.
Cloudfare’s alternative to Google Analytics is now available—for free—regardless of whether your a Cloudflare customer or not:
Being privacy-first means we don’t track individual users for the purposes of serving analytics. We don’t use any client-side state (like cookies or localStorage) for analytics purposes. Cloudflare also doesn’t track users over time via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other immutable attributes for the purposes of displaying analytics — we consider “fingerprinting” even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out.
A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:
CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.
Another alternative to Google Analytics—nice and lightweight too!
A simple, real-time website scanner to see what invisible creepers are lurking in the shadows and collecting information about you.
Looks good for adactio.com, thesession.org, and huffduffer.com …but clearleft.com is letting the side down.
Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh.
👏
In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder.
What over a decade of number-crunching analytics has taught me is that spending an hour writing, sharing, or helping someone is infinitely more valuable than spending that hour swimming through numbers. Moreover, trying to juice the numbers almost invariably divorces you from thinking about customers and understanding people. On the surface, it seems like a convenient proxy, but it’s not. They’re just numbers. If you’re searching for business insights, talking to real people beats raw data any day. It’s not as convenient, but when is anything worth doing convenient?
Dave stops feeding his site’s visitors data to Google. I wish more people (and companies) would join him.
There’s also an empowering #indieweb feeling about owning your analytics too. I pay for the server my analytics collector runs on. It’s on my own subdomain. It’s mine.
If you really, really have to add Google Analytics to a sites, here’s a way to do it in a more performant way, without the odious Google Tag Manager.
A list of alternatives to Google’s products.