Re: Manage analytics through tag manager?

On 30/6/20 13:55, Dave Page wrote:
> We currently use Google Analytics for analysing traffic on the
> website, and have done for many years. Whilst discussing some ideas to
> improve the user experience with Jonathan, it became clear to me that
> ideally we need outbound link tracking, i.e. what link did a user
> click that took them away from our site. This is useful to know so we
> can tell, for example, what download option a user ended up choosing,
> which can better inform us on how to improve the layout of the
> download pages.
>
> Whilst it is possible to do outbound link tracking directly in Google
> Analytics, it can be invasive, requiring onclick attributes on every
> link. It is (in theory) possible to dynamically add those using a
> script in the base template or similar, but I've never actually been
> able to get that to work when I've tried.
>
> Instead, I'd like to suggest we change to using Google Tag Manager
> directly in the site in place of Analytics. Tag Manager uses a couple
> of similar JS snippets to Analytics so would require minimal changes
> to the site. However, it can then be used (amongst many other things)
> to enable Analytics site-wide as it is now, and to automatically send
> outbound link clicks to Analytics globally or for subsets of pages and
> target URLs with no further code changes.
>
> Thoughts?

    Slightly different topic, but still related: there are growing
concerns about the privacy implications of using Google Analytics for
tracking. For a Community web like postgresql.org's, I'd say that
considering these privacy concerns should be important.

    There are many alternatives for achieving the same, or similar
knowledge about visits, but without the inconvenients of GA. Not picking
on any particular post, but here's an example listing such alternatives:
https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-to-google-analytics/

    Is this something that may be subject to consideration? I'd say
that our community has many privacy-focused users and this may better
serve them (us).

    Álvaro

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Alvaro Hernandez

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