A week ago, Fast Company published an article titled “It’s Time to Ditch Google Analytics.”
It was enough to deliver the fast click-through the headline was fishing for and all but stop my data-loving heart.
But reporter Katharine Schwab does have a point. In a world that is post-GDPR, post-Facebook scandal world, and offers a constant rotation of new online tools, new options are popping up right and left with the intention of stealing you away from Google’s free and robust analytics tool.
How? By offering users more protections and web managers a more streamlined interface. They may not offer as robust a data set, but these alternatives do pledge to offer a simpler interface, easier to digest analytics and the brownie points of giving your website users more privacy.
As Schawb points out:
“A spokesperson from Google denied that Google uses any data from Analytics as part of its advertising, but the fact that so many developers worry about it points to Google’s reputation as an opaque, data-hungry goliath.”
But as with most things, there is a flip side to this tradeoff. Are PR firms and creative agencies ready to trade free, robust metrics about gender, age groups and regions for paid tools that report less? This is invaluable information about the demographics our campaigns are targeting.
Would you trade data for user privacy on your clients’ websites? Why or why not? Tell us on Twitter.
