Re: Manage analytics through tag manager?

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.

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.

>
> (Same applies to Google Analytics of course -- and I think at some point
> we said we were going to re-evaluate our use of that and see if we already
> had enough information "on our own" for the things we actually do (since
> most of the details from GA I don't think we use), but I don't think we
> ever got around to it..)
>
> --
> Magnus Hagander
> Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
> Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>
>

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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