Re: Manage analytics through tag manager?

On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 12:18 PM Álvaro Hernández <aht(at)ongres(dot)com> wrote:

>
>
> On 1/7/20 10:07, Dave Page wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 6:42 PM Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 2:22 PM Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 1:07 PM Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 1:55 PM Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> 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.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Given the number of sites that completely break and fall over when one
>>>> blocks GTM, I have to ask: I assume this can be done in a way that has zero
>>>> impact on those who are sensible enough to block it?
>>>>
>>>
>>> I just tested on a couple of sites using it, and blocking didn't seem to
>>> affect use of the sites at all.
>>>
>>>
>> That's good.
>>
>> I'd still say we need a very clear reason for it if we're going to
>> collect more information about our visitors. That is, we need a plan for
>> what we're going to do with the data. If we don't have that, we should not
>> collect it.
>>
>
> Let's be clear here - we are not, and do not collect information about
> individual users (unless they sign up for an account of course).
>
> We collect anonymous usage information that is free of any form of PII
> that informs us on things like popularity of different pages so we can
> gauge what works and doesn't work content-wise, browser/device usage so we
> know what to test with, navigation patterns so we understand how people use
> our site, and the bit I think is valuable to add; outbound link usage, so
> we can understand (in the particular case I'm working on) what the
> popularity of different download options are, particularly those where we
> do not have any stats at all because they're hosted at third party sites.
>
>
> Not sure if with this reply you were also considering what I mentioned
> in the thread about GA concerns in general, but just in case: concerns
> about GA are not on what information we'd collect, but rather the
> information that, thanks to us, Google is collecting. Because this
> information can be cross-referenced with that from other sites, ads and
> probably many other sources.
>

No, I wasn't because the discussion of what to use for analytics is
tangential to the purpose of this thread which is to suggest a different
way to integrate with GA to enable to functionality that would be very
useful at the moment (the start of which can be seen in the other thread I
just started on this list). Proposing alternatives to GA is a valid topic,
but not something that's going to be decided and implemented in a day or
two.

>
> I'm all in to have usage and statistics information for the website
> --as long as they don't include PII of course, and only those that are used
> and reasonable-- but there are many other tools than GA to do this.
>
>
> Most of that cannot be gained through the very limited amount of server
> logs we have, and even that which can is not meaningful because they are
> purged very quickly and only kept for a short while for diagnostics because
> they do contain PII.
>
>
> Actually there is probably much of the information being used now that
> may be gathered from the logs. But anyway probably other existing tools are
> better than this.
>

Not really. There are no access logs on the cache servers, and very limited
logs on the backend server (which really only covers non-GET requests).

--
Dave Page
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Twitter: @pgsnake

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