When I go to a restaurant, I do not mind that the staff knows me. If I am a regular, I do not mind if they know my favourite dish and ask if I want it or suggest other dish I also may like.
I do mind if the restaurant keeps a note of everything I ever ate and is now sharing that information with dates attached with all restaurants.
What I absolutely dread is if now the restaurant is sending me unwarranted letters with their new menu options.
Thanks for the response! The food analogy is more apt than you might realise 😅 What if the restaurant kept a log of where you (and other patrons of course) sat and how many times you used the washroom, with the intent of optimising the table layout for navigability and speed of service?
This is more a curiosity question, analogising to heat maps and such; I don't plan to do any of that as I don't see the utility for me, but I do wonder where that practice falls in your estimation.
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.
Tracking where people click or hover their cursor sounds kinda creepy honestly. Like, why do you even need to know that stuff?
Doing it entirely yourself and not involving e.g. Google is infinitely better than Google, yeah, but it's still pretty creepy and still worth blocking.
-- Frost
Well, it does indicate which parts of your site are intuitive vs in need of improvement if you can see where people click and how long they spend looking at a given portion of the page.
But, like others have said, it's of questionable utility in the age of smartphones on websites that don't break the established design patterns, so I pretty much agree entirely that it's unnecessarily invasive. At least, for my site!
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.)
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 that are time tested. It's not like the early days when we were trying this all out new and "clunky" was the best description. Unless your site is doing something unconventional on purpose with fundamentals like navigation, it's 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.
we all follow the selected patterns
So often I write “elements that follow W3 patterns do not require additional explanation” to try and get people away from their bizarre unexplainable widget.
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 fewer 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.
How much of a difference does company size make, when gauging the impact of individual words? Because it sounds like it's a problem to spend millions on, when millions are a few percent of sales and fractions matter. Surely individual words aren't the path from ~$100 monthly revenue to tens of thousands?
I've seen more than a few times a single word change A/B sales 1%/10000% of a category. Sure that means more the bigger you are, but you would be surprised how often words turn people on or off. They get confused
Anyone who has spent time doing ad copy levels of wordsmithing would probably understand. Imagine Nike's creative dept saying Nike--Just do stuff. Words matter. Would the Squatty Potty sell as well if it were the Pooper Stooper?
Edit: most often the offending word was a turn off or confusing to people in a way that only became understood after the fact. Oh! That's why. The right word usually removed barriers for client understanding. Sorry I can't remember specifics atm.
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)
Might be stupid, I'm doing that with my business. Its just a portfolio, no need for bullshit.
Portfolio of...? If you're for hire I'd be interested in perusing, regardless. I'm always grateful to find skilled contacts to work with.
Can't disclose the page here as to not dox myself. But I run and own a software systems company in Germany. We do software development and operate the software for the customer on Linux based servers reliability guarantees and high availability setups. I and several employees have also an academic background in IT security. :) what do you do?
Fair enough, nothing here is really private after all, so I appreciate even that much. I've got a general plan to stand up a Matrix server soon; I'll DM you my handle when I've got it up and running if you'd like to contact me there.
To answer your question in a long-winded but hopefully entertaining read: I don't have an academic background, myself. I dropped out of college and got my certificates like the A+ and CCNA, MCP too back when that was a thing (dating myself a bit). My favorite story is passing the Linux course without the textbook, on the logic that all the information I could need to pass was available on the internet. I was right 😂 Went straight into working in IT after that.
I'm a sysadmin by career, and an indefatigable entrepreneur by nature. My latest venture is a food brand here in the US; I built it with the intent to automate as much as possible so I can run it alongside my day job, from anywhere. Self-funded, which is kind of scary and rather limiting, but this structure gives me endurance to carry on as long as I have gainful employment (or until my other projects bear profit).
I also named my company in such a way that I can expand into other industries naturally, without having to rebrand. That's because I don't have any great passion for food specifically - more of a general desire to produce high quality output that other people can use, or enjoy, or otherwise benefit from, and a lot of different personal interests.
Sounds good. We have a matrix server, let's get together there when we can. :) I started as a sysadmin and with Linux and then went to do security for a while and got into professional software development and keeping the software available and working in 2014. Haven't stopped since. We developed our first own product last year and will begin selling this year. :)
In any case, I would put this information prominently on your website.
It's definitely going in my privacy policy, at least! 😅
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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!
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/
I did the same thing. Meh.
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.
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
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