Re: Manage analytics through tag manager?

From: Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
To: Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org>
Cc: PostgreSQL WWW <pgsql-www(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Manage analytics through tag manager?
Date: 2020-07-01 19:28:21
Message-ID: CABUevExrqTFN3rcMgqFQH-5-yTJJ0fiEBvi9ec2ySJYMz+uiQw@mail.gmail.com
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On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 10:07 AM Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> 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).
>

I think that's a matter of definition. Well, *we* don't, but Google might.

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.
>

There's a fair amount of stuff we could get out of those *if we wanted to*.
Basically, if the information we want to look at is present in the http
requests or responses, we could easily collect metrics on that without
involving a third party. The only reason we're not doing that today, is
that we have not defined what kind of metrics we actually want.

Now don't get me wrong -- I'm not against collecting proper metrics, and
using the right tool for it. I'm just saying we shouldn't collect more
information than we need (and by "we" I mean neither we nor google on our
behalf (or another third party)). So I think we should really start with
what we need, and take it from there.

And if what we need cannot be collected from the request data that we
already have, then we should certainly look at other solutions. Whether
they're Google Analytics or Tag Manager or a separate product we install on
our own infra etc. I think in particular when you say "outbound link data
usage" you mean people clicking links on our site that goes to a different
site, right? That being requests that never hit our servers, it wouldn't be
in our request data. But if that's *all* we care about around them, we
could just have a tiny collector dumping that data into a postgres
database...

//Magnus

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