A 10-Point Best Practice Privacy Guide for Working With Google Analytics
Last year, privacy became mainstream news when the new EU privacy law came into effect on 26th May 2011 across all EU member states - see my...
Last year, privacy became mainstream news when the new EU privacy law came into effect on 26th May 2011 across all EU member states - see my...
An odd announcement form the GA product team was made last night that affects all users of web analytics tools: When a signed in user visits your...
Lots of interesting discussion sparked by my last post on the new EU privacy law, so I thought it worth while to follow up and clarify a few...
Following new EU laws aimed at protecting the privacy of online users, there has been much said about the death of web tracking as we know it. At present the wording of the law is stating that visitors to your website must explicitly consent to having cookies stored on their computers. As pretty much all web analytics tools reply on cookies for visitor tracking, there are clearly implications for anyone that uses these on their site...
As readers of this blog will know, I am a strong advocate of online privacy... That may sound strange coming from a web analytics evangelist. However, if we as an industry do not sort these privacy issues out, there is a real danger that web analytics as we know it today will disappear completely.
So, following the recent excellent post from Phil Kemelor on The FTC Privacy Report, “Do Not Track” Options and Web Analytics, I wanted to also add my take here...
Predicting the future invariably means you will be wrong most of the time. However, it is an interesting process to go through as even getting just one prediction right can have a significant impact – to me personally, my business or my client’s business. So I was honoured when Daniel Waisberg asked me to look into my crystal ball for what may happen in the world of web analytics in 2011. Here's the summary of my predictions:
I wanted to put this out there to illustrate the type of crap competitors will go to to discredit Google Analytics. The link takes you to an article by clicktale which is a rehash of a previous discredited post by Brandt Dainow last year. Take a minute to read it and the two so called flaws of Google Analytics...
Privacy on the web has always been a contentious issue, as the vast majority of users wish to remain anonymous while browsing. However, little...
Leaving aside the issue of privacy, is it valid to track visitors as individuals? From a marketer's perspective, tracking individuals sounds great in theory - you understand your customers better right? But if you receive 10,000 visitors per day and have weekly marketing performance meetings, that equals 70,000 data points to discuss? Best practice is to consider longer time frames in order to mitigate against calendar anomalies i.e. weekends v weekdays, holidays, the weather, force majeure etc... So for one month that could be 280,000 data points.