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?
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.
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.