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The goal of marketing is to get product in front of the right audience. The proposed solution you mention would include plenty of folks who don’t convert. That

The goal of marketing is to get product in front of the right audience. The proposed solution you mention would include plenty of folks who don’t convert. That would likely create less effective results for marketing. Also, what would you use to monitor user behavior to improve your product if third party tracking is frowned upon?

ianschmitz 6y ago
I would also love to know as I've leveraged custom events in Google Analytics fairly extensively in the past.
- azernik 6y ago
  Google Analytics custom events and Datadog are in fact the only third-party analytics code I run in my app. Tools like GA that gather less-identifiable user behavior info are borderline in my book between technical and marketing; and I honestly just trust Google as an organization not to mix my own GA data into their marketing data.
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    > I honestly just trust Google as an organization not to mix my own GA data into their marketing data. If you turn on demographic information in GA that explicitly also allows the data from your instance to be shared with Google’s advertising products.
    - azernik 6y ago
      Yup! I happen to not do that; part of why I trust Google on this (in the site owner role) is that they're good at making privacy-compromising options clearly-delineated and optional.
azernik 6y ago
Well, here is where my hot take and general principle needs some nuance :-P > The proposed solution you mention would include plenty of folks who don’t convert. The one bit of data I currently have going from the app to corpweb analytics is precisely this - associating a conversion with a website user. That conversion info is sent with hand-coded triggers, the relevant third-party libraries are self-hosted (a good thing generally), and code doesn't call out to it when the user is outside of the billing/subscription flow. > Also, what would you use to monitor user behavior to improve your product if third party tracking is frowned upon? I'm open to A/B-testing stuff - the important part in my mind is less specifically about third-party tracking, and more about ensuring that the product/engineering team makes decisions about the product. Pulling third-party code of any kind, but especially tracking code, is a process full of footguns that should be under the control of people who know what they're doing and are empowered to say "no". I would still be very cautious about giving analytics code full access to all user activity.
cuu508 6y ago
> Also, what would you use to monitor user behavior to improve your product if third party tracking is frowned upon? * user testing, user interviews * (there's probably a fancy word for this) generate usage metrics from production data. If the product is e.g. a To Do app, you could measure "engagement" by counting how many To Do items each user has created * first-party tracking – analyze access logs, self-hosted analytics
- manigandham 6y ago
  99% of the time, 1st-party tracking just means hosting the tracking script on their own domain, the data still gets sent to 3rd-party analytics services.
doliveira 6y ago
Well, self-hosted analytics. And if the deal is conversions, you can send them to Google from your own server, sending just the user ID.

ianschmitz 6y ago

I would also love to know as I've leveraged custom events in Google Analytics fairly extensively in the past.

azernik 6y ago
Google Analytics custom events and Datadog are in fact the only third-party analytics code I run in my app. Tools like GA that gather less-identifiable user behavior info are borderline in my book between technical and marketing; and I honestly just trust Google as an organization not to mix my own GA data into their marketing data.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  > I honestly just trust Google as an organization not to mix my own GA data into their marketing data. If you turn on demographic information in GA that explicitly also allows the data from your instance to be shared with Google’s advertising products.
  - azernik 6y ago
    Yup! I happen to not do that; part of why I trust Google on this (in the site owner role) is that they're good at making privacy-compromising options clearly-delineated and optional.

azernik 6y ago

Well, here is where my hot take and general principle needs some nuance :-P > The proposed solution you mention would include plenty of folks who don’t convert. The one bit of data I currently have going from the app to corpweb analytics is precisely this - associating a conversion with a website user. That conversion info is sent with hand-coded triggers, the relevant third-party libraries are self-hosted (a good thing generally), and code doesn't call out to it when the user is outside of the billing/subscription flow. > Also, what would you use to monitor user behavior to improve your product if third party tracking is frowned upon? I'm open to A/B-testing stuff - the important part in my mind is less specifically about third-party tracking, and more about ensuring that the product/engineering team makes decisions about the product. Pulling third-party code of any kind, but especially tracking code, is a process full of footguns that should be under the control of people who know what they're doing and are empowered to say "no". I would still be very cautious about giving analytics code full access to all user activity.

cuu508 6y ago

> Also, what would you use to monitor user behavior to improve your product if third party tracking is frowned upon? * user testing, user interviews * (there's probably a fancy word for this) generate usage metrics from production data. If the product is e.g. a To Do app, you could measure "engagement" by counting how many To Do items each user has created * first-party tracking – analyze access logs, self-hosted analytics

manigandham 6y ago
99% of the time, 1st-party tracking just means hosting the tracking script on their own domain, the data still gets sent to 3rd-party analytics services.

doliveira 6y ago

Well, self-hosted analytics. And if the deal is conversions, you can send them to Google from your own server, sending just the user ID.