I’m pretty principled. I block as much tracking as I can in my personal use of the web because what I do isn’t anyone’s business but my own. So, the idea that I have to put trackers on my site is pretty noxious to me, and I have thus far refused.
This isn’t an ad and I don’t want my personal account associated with my business, so no URLs, but I would like to know what you all think: is this something worthwhile that people will appreciate, or am I letting my principles guide me off a cliff because nobody cares that much?
You can do self-hosted tracking but the real question is what are you going to do with the data.
Honestly except for huge companies the data mostly gets ignored until you redesign your whole site at which point the only data that gets used is trying to figure out how people actually use your site.
If you have a dedicated front end team you can use the data to see if there are patterns (or anti-patterns) you want to optimize for, but beyond that you probably only care about 2 things, what drives people to your site and where they go once they are on your site.
But while OP may not have use of the data now, they might have a use for it in the future.
Or like most companies when they go to dig into their data they find it doesn’t have what they want.
This urge to stalk everyone that uses websites because what if the data is usefull later? Isn’t really that useful because once you figure out what questions you need to ask, if it’s more complicated than “what drives people to your site and where they go once they are on your site.”, the data is often too messy to do anything useful with (at least I’m my experience I’m not a frontend guy though)
kinda. Majority of people don’t care and those that do will block it. Im fine with telemetry in general and for things I trust im fine allowing it through. It really comes down to selling it to third parties that is the issue. They then hoover it up and combine with all sorts of other data sources and a some central places slices and dices it. It can be anonymized but it just takes a few dots connected and the anonymization is out the window. Just gets worse with llms and stuff being able to poor over data.
All fair points, confirming some of my suspicions. This kind of direct practical experience is exactly what I was hoping read when I posted this question. Really appreciate you taking the time to respond and expand on that, thank you!
I did the same thing. Meh.
“Meh” as in that’s how it worked out for you, or…?
Haha, nah just “meh” in terms of I don’t care if I don’t have the analytical data.
Not the answer to your question, but there are many open source and privacy respecting tracking/analytics services that you can even self-host. Like Rybbit, Shynet, Matomo, Plausible etc.
A valuable contribution to the thread nonetheless! The more names provided, the less research I or anyone else reading here will have to do to find them, and of all the gifts I could receive saved time is amongst the greatest (👉 ﾟヮﾟ)👉
Okay, more info then. I have used selfhosted shynet, I loved the UI. And am using rybbit’s official instance. Both can provide analytics without any cookies. Shynet works even when users have JavaScript disabled. Both can track UTM links too.
Oooh. Analytics without cookies or JS is very attractive, and UTM links might be useful. I’ll check out Shynet too, cheers!
My entire business is pretty much run by feels. I often get asked why I don’t do X, Y, and Z like everyone else, and the answer is usually that I didn’t feel like it.
Doesn’t hurt the revenue - or maybe it does - I wouldn’t know.
How I’ve been running to this point and it’s scary, but honestly seems to be working out fine. Other than sales in the toilet, but I did just start a few months back.
Also, I like your handle. Nostalgia for a MUD I used to play back in the day. It’s still online I think. Dunno if any of the descriptions I wrote are still in the game though, it’s been over twenty years!
If you’re controlling your own web server, the logs will give you plenty of data for analytical purposes without needing to be adding trackers.
It’s hosted, currently, but the logs can’t show things like heatmaps (where people click or hover their cursor), and I’d have to build a dashboard to display those stats.
But, this is interesting, because I’d still look at this as tracking. But maybe people are more okay if it’s not going to Google? Is it less about being tracked and more about not being tracked by Big Tech, do you think?
Logging is standard practice if you give even the slightest damn about security (read: you should), so I don’t see it as a problem. It’s what you use those logs for, how long they’re retained, and whether you sell them off.
So as long as you’re only using them for security auditing and website analytics and don’t keep them forever and don’t plan to sell them to data brokers, there’s really nothing to fret over. A good place to disclose how you use the logs, how long you retain them, and what is logged is in the site’s privacy policy.
I’m all with it from a consumer point of view as long as there is no sharing, no use beyond your own website & sales optimisation.
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You rolled your own analytics?
Also does it show 24 page views, 12 sessions, 0 visitors?
This is right in my wheelhouse. No, it’s not stupid.
The vast majority of web analytics are actually objectively useless. Yes, you will generate a lot of data. No, obsessing over this data is unlikely to lead to making your website better in any way whatsoever.
Thing the first: My personal “business” website (I use this term very loosely) isn’t even dynamic. Yes, Flightless Forge is static HTML. I don’t even use any Javavscript. The horror!
Thing the second: That’s because for my job I manage an online storefront that’s completely bespoke (written by: guess who) and part of the above is because I decided I really don’t want to bring work home with me. We used to use every stupid analytics platform under the sun and over time, one by one, I wound up turning them all off. This is because they’re not only privacy nightmares for our users but also incredibly bloated, and provide all-singing, all dancing dashboards that are veritable avalanches of useless information that management never successfully used to do anything. So I gave up.
The problems with these things is that they make big promises couched in marketing-speak, but there is no actual way to realistically deliver on those results. It’s the Night Watchman problem for the digital age.
There is very little actual useful information you can glean from your userbase other than what pages they went to and when. Especially now, mouse cursor heatmaps tell a distorted story because 90% of your users will be on mobile and will have no mouse cursor. Behavior flow indicators will only tell you what you already know, which is that your users insist on using incorrect search terms and don’t read. Vanishingly little you can do aside from ensuring that no part of your interface is outright broken will actually increase your conversion rate. You cannot actually determine what your users are thinking unless they tell you, and even then they will lie to you.
So my strategy has instead become to make our website work the way I want it to work on a daily basis, by avoiding the annoyances that annoy me. It must be working, because we have one of the highest rated sites in our industry and our clients go out of their way to compliment us on how much easier to use it is than our competitors.
The number one thing that will drive users away from your site and hurt your conversion rate is anything they perceive as friction in your process, because as soon as they encounter the slightest frustration or adversity or even a simple behavior of your interface that doesn’t behave the way they expect it to, they’ll click off and go somewhere else. Nirvana is achieved when you realize that a nontrivial fraction of the “friction” your users experienced was in fact them shooting themselves in the foot by being stupid and you can’t do anything about this. I log what people put in the search box, for instance, and you would not believe the asinine shit they put in there. Your best practices are therefore not to give the user enough rope to hang himself, and compensate for his stupidity at every opportunity.
(And no, I am not telling you where I work.)
I really want to know some of the asinine search’s though.
Behavior flow indicators will only tell you what you already know, which is that your users insist on using incorrect search terms and don’t read
This, amongst other accuracies in your comment, convince me you know what you’re talking about (my career is in IT so it rings particularly true 😂). Thank you, it’s reassuring to hear that I’m not totally off-base!
Just going to semi-counter argument so this doesn’t feel like a circle jerk.
Analytics are there to help you refine you user flow paths and even refine verbiage to make the whole experience frictionless. With a GDPR style consent banner and a limited and deliberate analytics package you can better fine tune things. Even changing a single word in A/B testing can show results for you and your users. The goal is to make the entire experience as frictionless as possible. Not evil. Just serving the win-win.
Now to step back for a little perspective to counter my counter. Web properties are very mature these days and we all follow the selected patterns. It’s not like the early days when we were trying this all out and “clunky” was the best description. Unless your site is doing something unconventional on purpose with fundamentals like navigation, its probably not a big deal.
Edit: most companies drop in extensive premium analytics. Then once they know the newly deployed site is good, everyone forgets except for make work reporting to execs.
Even changing a single word in A/B testing can show results for you and your users.
Do you know anybody that does A/B testing using analytics?
I’ve worked on backend stuff for companies large and small and I’ve never seen the analytics used outside of post-hoc rationalizations of changes that were already implemented
Yes. All the major analytics packages have functions specifically for A/B. Not everyone knows how, even few bother.
Do you know anybody that uses A/B testing to update their website design or content?
I know the tools can provide analytics to support this, but I’ve never seen anyone actually use the feature, except for
post-hoc rationalizations of changes that were already implemented
Like I’ve seen a/b used to justify a major website refresh that was going to be done anyway, but I’ve never seen it affect the design or wording.
Yes. The smartest clients I ever worked for would A/B individual words. They matter, a lot.
Always appreciate the counterpoint - it is, after all, why I asked! I know I’m very particular about the things I’m particular about, and I know that’s not necessarily true of anyone else. You’re absolutely right about the utility, one thing my prior host’s stats showed was that of thousands of people who visited the front page, only a few dozen went anywhere else, and only 1 got to the checkout page.
The thing is though, I did kinda already know that people were bouncing off the front page; the numbers just showed it in concrete terms. I knew the site needed an overhaul and badly; not only was it not converting, I just wasn’t happy with it. On top of that, I’ve got only one product, with everything needed to purchase on a single page, so there’s not even really that much to track. And, as you say: I’m not doing anything unconventional. Another point against needing advanced tracking.
Thank you again for your comment, I really do appreciate you taking the time 🙏
Personally, I think not having analytics is great.
As others have said, how this will impact your business will strongly depend on what customers you work with and how you acquire them.
If you heavily depend on customers finding you through that website in the first place, a human/authentic/privacy-respecting site will strongly speak to a minority of potential customers, but might be a competitive disadvantage. All the better when you have a market niche where you could afford this.
Louis has a ranty vlog on this topic (more centered on SEO and content, but I believe similar ideas apply): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc
In any case, I would put this information prominently on your website.
It’s definitely going in my privacy policy, at least! 😅
I appreciate your decision. But it depends on the type of business you do. If you are running a utility business like plumbing or carpentry or a service like law, you might not need the trackers. But if your are running some sort of ecommerce shop, and you wish to entice your customers with offers, deal or personalized recommendations then in theory tracking should help.
But as far as I am concerned, I tend to pefer a service that has little to no trackers. There is nothing worse than visiting a page and you have to consent to 1000 trackers. Try with no trackers for a few months then its up to you to decide whether to add the trackers or not.
Personalized recommendations don’t really work at that level. Unless you have a large catalog or an incredibly loyal user base it’s better to just look at items purchased together and upsell those.
Thanks for responding! Yeah, it’s e-commerce. It’s only one product though, which is maybe a point in favour of no tracking. I have a newsletter too, but it’s not “marketing” e.g. “on sale now, don’t miss it!” - part of my brand is recipes, and the newsletter only goes out when I post a new recipe to the site. I don’t plan to use the email list for anything else, for similar reasons to not wanting trackers 😅 About the trackiest thing I’m willing to do is coupon codes, which feels okay for tracking social post success.
Can I ask, would it sway your decision to check it out if you saw there were no trackers? If you saw that in an ad, vs people talking about it online? (I have a theory that some “selling points” only work by word of mouth, and in an ad they have the opposite effect)
I have seen “consent banners” that pretty much say “no consent needed, we don’t do shit”, which I usually found slightly charming. Tended to unobtrusive, dismissable, and with no interaction required to use the site.
There’s more than a few FOSS and privacy focused analytics tools it there. Umami is very simple but great: https://github.com/umami-software/umami
There are others as well
I really appreciate this suggestion as a starting point - I did some looking but I didn’t come across Umami yet. Will read up on that and use it to find other FOSS alternatives. Thank you!
I used umami cloud (free tier) on my personal site for 6-12 months and can recommend it. I ultimately decided to switch to just a simple counter for visits and likes because that’s all i care about and i don’t like collecting more information than i “need”. Now my website has no other tracking/analytics and the entire site still works even if Javascript is disabled.
For a business if you’re wanting a Google analytics alternative then umami does a great job. Self hosted option available as well.
To your initial question, if you’d actually use the data then i would recommend some form of privacy respecting analytics on your business site though. Since you seem privacy conscious i just wouldn’t put more analytics on your website than you’d personally be ok with as an end user
Self-hosted, you say…? Yet another point in favour of Umami, if I’m going with analytics. But you also said:
i just wouldn’t put more analytics on your website than you’d personally be ok with as an end user
Exactly this, three times over. I haven’t checked Umami yet but one big friction point for putting analytics on is that my pihole won’t even let me visit the root URLs of most of analytics provider sites, so I’d have to disable blocking just to check the stats, and I don’t like lowering that drawbridge. “A fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded”, sort of sentiment. I really don’t feel comfy putting trackers on that I myself would avoid.
Self-host Umami and set the tracker URL to your custom domain (it gives the URL once up and running) and it won’t get blocked or cause these problems with blacklists. Pretty easy.
also plausible.io
simple, privacy-friendly, and effective
I do the occasional website for local businesses, and I never add any analytics code/trackers. One: they rarely ever ask. And two: the one time someone did ask for it, they never once logged into it or asked for trends. Three: I’d prefer not to unless they demand it.
However, since I’m actually hosting the website for them, I can get decent heat maps from the access logs since they have the IP (which can be roughly geo-located), which URI’s are accessed (and those map to pages, and pages map to products/services), how often those are accessed, which page linked them to it or if they came directly to it (by checking the referrer header), which are most accessed (by count of the URI in the logs), and whether they’re accessing the site from desktop or mobile (via the user agent header). That can also be combined with any data from their “Contact us” form.
One reason they’ve probably never asked for it is because I provide a quarterly report for them using that passive data, and they seem happy with it.
the one time someone did ask for it, they never once logged into it or asked for trends
That’s the other thing, I’m not going to have the time to be babysitting numbers haha 😅 I might check it out every few months or if there’s a specific reason. Other users have suggested gathering insights from the logs too, I think that’s the way I’m going to go. Valuable insight, thank you!
Isnt… that analytics? Sure you are maybe not saving fingerprints but if you save ips, which routes those ip access, user agent information and you can even connect it to contact forms ?
Technically, yes. But colloquially, when we’re talking about “analytics” we mean embedded 3rd party trackers that feed to Google or another outside entity. Those are embedded much deeper in the application and track things much more invasively such as how long you hover over certain links, how you move your cursor around the screen, your viewport size, browser fingerprinting, and more.
The analytics I’m utilizing and referring to here are passive in that they’re collected anyway as part of the standard logging that happens when you access the webserver which is also part of our basic security posture. They’re not as granular or invasive but can still give you useful information about what parts of your site people use the most, how many clicks it takes a visitor to get from the homepage to where they want to be (by following the IP, URI, and seeing where that ends), how many visitors the site gets per day/week/month/etc, and such.
Okay interesting! Thanks for explaining
Yeah, there seems to be different tolerance for different “kinds” of analytics amongst the people who care. The consensus so far seems to be that as long as I’m only using the data for myself, delete it after a while, and don’t sell it, it’s fine? Which does make sense, to me anyway.
There’s tracking 😠 and there’s “tracking” 🤷
Keeping track of what user behaviours are like in terms of how people interface with your system should be expected. Keeping track of the information on users as they go about their business away from your site or maintaining individualised logs of users behaviour to identify them is the bad stuff. Employing dark patterns to manipulate users is bad.
love it. you could feature a banner saying “no analytics/tracking”. better yet, feature a banner if users don’t have an ad blocker:
https://stefanbohacek.com/project/detect-missing-adblocker-wordpress-plugin/
Hahaha oh I like that plugin. I might do it. It conflicts with my “no popups” ethos, but it might be worth it for the comedy 😂 Thanks for sharing!
In this particular case, you’d be doing visitors to your site a service.
But yeah, not stupid at all, very sensible given GDPR etc. Can’t have a data breach if there’s no data to breach. :)
I think it is fair enough to have trackers on your page and I also think it is fair enough that it should remain useable for people that block trackers. Unfortunately a lot of pages are built around third party tracking and are non functional for anybody with integrity filters.
