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Disclaimer: I am a data analyst. I consult companies in regards to ethical data collection. But I also know of black sheep. I don't have a problem with website

Disclaimer: I am a data analyst. I consult companies in regards to ethical data collection. But I also know of black sheep. I don't have a problem with websites measuring what I view, click, add to cart or buy. I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. And if they do marketing I even want them to be able to see from which source of traffic (aka marketing effort) how many conversions (whatever comprises a conversion) stems. The problem imho isn't GTM (Google Tagmanager) running as proxy. This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically. At least under one imho essential condition: I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering. And on the second essential condition that marketing departments act ethically. They can send the web analytics data to whatever tool they like. But they should absolutely not send my identifying information with it. They should use the proxy as a privacy protector. The same when sending conversion data to the marketing tools. I am OK with the marketer sending information back that a specific ad (not a specific user clicking on a specific ad) led to a conversion. I don't need Meta or Alphabet tracking me personally (or my clients'users) with every click. But I understand the business need to measure the effectiveness of marketing money spent. Solutions like these could be a way to achieve this. If done right. And not done in the way GTM does (only hosting on Google, using an A/AAAA subdomain, grabbing every cookie possibly and so on).

curiousmindz 5y ago
Sadly, most publishers are not interested in developing their own proxy solution just for the sake of data privacy. They vastly prefer a ready-made solution that they can just use. Much of the power of the advertising space come from people (publishers, consumers and advertisers) generally choosing the path of least resistance. They don't have the technical know-how and they would only acquire it if there were enough benefits. Sadly, privacy is not enough on its own. I think the solution that can solve all that is when a company acts as a "wall" between consumers and publishers/advertisers. Then, that company can protect the consumer while keeping the user experience as simple as possible. "Sign in with Apple" is one such solution. But of course, it brings its own (different) downsides.
deepstack 5y ago
>The problem imho isn't GTM (Google Tagmanager) running as proxy. This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically. At least under one imho essential condition: I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering. Yup that is where rubber meets the road. Would like to offer google as little data as possible. And use as little google products as possible on the web and internet.
- andrewingram 5y ago
  Sibling comment shares this link, but you can run this in your own infrastructure (this is actually how Segment does server-side publishing to Google Analytics, because until very recently there hasn't been a proper API for it): https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
black_puppydog 5y ago
> the second essential condition that marketing departments act ethically This seems like a pretty strong assumption, given that both an engrained culture, lived experience, and an analysis of the different parties' incentives stand against this. Until we have strong (and crucially, really enforced) legislation against this, I'd say technical means (blocking JS mostly) will be the only thing I'd be willing to bet on.
jacquesm 5y ago
Marketing is almost by definition not going to act ethically: their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one, and the KPIs by which marketing departments are run are proof positive of that. Nobody starts off with 'what would be the natural limit of our product sales', instead they start off with 'what is the total addressable market and how do we maximize our fraction of that' implying that if you are counted in their market that you are fair game whether you like it or not.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one This is reductionist. Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? In a sense. But in another sense, it was broadcasting a better way of being. Marketing doesn’t have to be evil. Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    > Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? People were telling each other about these. > Marketing doesn’t have to be evil. No, indeed it doesn't. But as a rule it definitely appears to be. It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is. > Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly. If 99% of the people engaging in an activity are doing it badly then I'm all for reigning them in, in spite of the 1% that are doing a swell job.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is This is a good analogy. In stories, arsenic is almost without fail evil. In reality, it has use in medicine, agriculture and ceramics [1]. > If 99% of the people engaging in an activity are doing it badly then I'm all for reigning them in We agree. And I have no horse in this race. But that 99% figure is largely confined to tech-based marketing. The people painting print ads and planning PR stunts aren’t hurting anyone. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic#Uses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic#Uses
baybal2 5y ago
Just block the script by its checksum, and the issue is solved
- beagle3 5y ago
  Article addresses this: google is actually encouraging users to modify said script.
janpot 5y ago
> I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. That's not what they're doing, at all. They want to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of maximising profits. That may correlate with good user experience sometimes, but more often it results in the opposite.
- franga2000 5y ago
  Exactly! A company's goal is profit and most of the time, that does not align with the customer's goals. Amazon's goal is to sell me the highest margin item, I want the best value or highest quality. I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around!
  - airstrike 5y ago
    > I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around! As a small aside, The capitalist's answer is that regulating companies to prevent them from steering to the most profitable items is both impossible to be adequately done and prohibitively costly. Even assuming cost isn't an issue, it's hard to imagine such regulation to be equally applied to all market participants (or to be equally effective). So we would be left with companies that cooperate and others that defect, and the defectors would be favored (more profitable) and outcompete the cooperators in the long run. So instead we start from the assumption that companies are greedy and let them compete to offer customers the best value -- and if that value comes (at least in part) from not being tracked, companies that do not track will attract more customers. We probably just haven't made enough of a fuss about it with our dollar-votes. For what it's worth, I block all ads without giving it a single thought. The way I think about it is that on the flip side of the prisoner's dilemma, I'm just defecting like some companies would. It's a race to the bottom in terms of the trust between customers and companies, but I didn't make the rules of the game...
runarberg 5y ago
How effective is tracking in increasing user experience over less invasive techniques, e.g. like asking users?
- TZVdosOWs3kZHus 5y ago
  This! The most valuable information is collected via classic communication! We include basic opt-in tracking (selectable in our installer) to get information about basic usage untangled to certain users. While this is just a statistical overview, it shows to us which parts of our software get used only for the customers who activated this kind of tracking. The most valuable information we get is through our forum which is open to everyone regardless of whether tracking is activated or not.
- pfooti 5y ago
  Most companies do both. If just asking users questions was strictly better than passive tracking, that's probably all they'd do - analytics have a real cost to use, that cost wouldn't be paid if the information gathered was useless. But, people are pretty remarkably bad at asking for things. It's mostly the "better horse" problem. People ask for fixes to proximal issues (make this faster, cheaper, better) and not the big things. In my own product, we use gtm to understand where in our sign up funnel people fall off. It is a complicated product and a complicated sign up flow. Since people who fall out of the funnel are unreachable, we can't just ask them why. But we can observe that (say) 40% of users bounce off of step X, so let's make that step easier.
charcircuit 5y ago
>I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering. This is already true. https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
- sdoering 5y ago
  Thanks - didn't know that. Interesting. Might be a solution for a client of the team I work in (but not my client).
robalni 5y ago
> I don't have a problem with websites measuring what I view, click, add to cart or buy. I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. The problem is not that they measure things. The problem is that they enter the user's private area; they run code on the user's computer and probably grab information about the user too (I don't know exactly how tag managers work because I have never used one). It's like if I enter your home and start measuring things, the problem is not that I measure things, it's that I entered your private area.
- sdoering 5y ago
  Well actually it is more like they you are entering their store. They are measuring the number of people that come in. The number of items (and what items) these people look at. Add to their basket. How many stand in line at the cashier and how many buy. And how many filled baskets stand in the isles at the end of the day. But - they also could write down the gender of anyone entering the shop. Or the hair color. Or they could note down the license plate of your car. With whom you arrive. The brand of your car. The color. The brands of the clothes you visibly wear. Then they correlate that to the payment method, your Visa card, the credit ranking they receive back from visa (digitally at least). And so on. and they measure how often you return. They could do all of this (and actually a big lot of them does) and not only log that for themselves and do whatever analysis with it, but also send this data happily to the advertising agency that manages the big signs all over town so that they can show you additional advertisements for a new car, because you have money, but your car is old. That is were the problem begins. It begins when doing way too invasive logging of user attributes that do only marginally have anything to do with measuring how the shop (or the website) work. And more so when this data is being sent to who knows whom in this advertising space out there. I have no problem with an online store storing the fact that I came by clicking on a display ad. Or on an email newsletter. Or that I am using Firefox. Or Chrome. And that I am on a WIn10 desktop device. Or that I tend to add a lot of stuff to my shopping cart, wait two hours and then sort what I don't need. I even do not have a problem showing me additional products based on what I looked at in their shop. But to correlate that with offsite data, sending this to advertisers and so on is a no go for me.
- collegeburner 5y ago
rvanlaar 5y ago
You're hitting the nail on the head. I'm not against the website owners seeing what I do on their website. What I am against is what other parties are able to do with the data when sold. They're able to correlate website visits with specific businesses and linkedin profiles.
mkdirp 5y ago
> This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically. Most, if not all, tracking is unethical.
yunohn 5y ago
> not done in the way GTM does (only hosting on Google, using an A/AAAA subdomain, grabbing every cookie possibly and so on). It’s provided as a Docker image that you can run anywhere you want. https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
aeyes 5y ago
> But I understand the business need to measure the effectiveness of marketing money spent. Why? They are not able to track TV, newspaper, billboard or radio campaigns but still spend a lot of marketing money on these.
- sdoering 5y ago
  The are at least quite able to correlate these. Tracking TV advertising'impact is relatively easy and straight forward. Same for out of home advertising. And with a bit more effort attribution to newspaper/magazine advertising is also possible. But. It often isn't necessary. More often than not these forms of advertising are not direct marketing. They don't necessarily have a call to action. They are a branding asset. And brand awareness is measured differently. With different means. So while you can and should measure the direct impact, this isn't the main focus. The same way response and conversion rates on direct marketing efforts were meticulously measured long before the internet. There were even AB tests being run on mailings (snail mail) on test flights to identify the campaigns with the best ROI. I have a booklet from 1978, the year I was born, explaining AB testing for direct marketing campaigns. Except for the speed, nothing changed. Nowadays we only have more intrusive tracking methods if we decide to go that route. But the underlying methods (statistics, measuring success, et al) habe not significantly changed.
achairapart 5y ago
While I agree with the ethical matter, from what I understand Google offered some form of server-side analytics APIs since ages[0]. I know, this is different from this new GTM server-side thing, but nonetheless it already offered technical ways of proxy-tracking data with whatever infrastructure available, also circumventing ad-blockers. This to say that this server-side approach is nothing totally new. I'm sure some big business already implemented it, you can't just easily notice it everywhere like the client-side counterpart. The difference here is that now Google has tinkered some ready made solution, using its own infrastructure. Maybe it's also a matter of convenience: It has always been mostly trivial to setup some JS to collect this data (often, as easy as just pasting a single script tag in your HTML). Once you need App Engine, DNS setup, etc not every business will likely jump into all this technical burden, and this could slow the adoption of the whole server-side tracking. Or maybe not. Who knows. [0]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v4 https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/...
kall 5y ago
On the conversion tracking point, because I just wrote a privacy policy section on this: I just send the conversion event for the ad, but the advertiser almost certainly has all the user info tied to that already, right? I can say "not my department" but still. Of course facebook would prefer you just send it all app events, in perpetuity, just in case.
collegeburner 5y ago
Similarly, I want to be able to show my users ads. They're not really bad ads, but otherwise I lose money on providing service. And then we risk the "youtube paradox": keep showing more ads to your ad watching users so they subsidize the growing number of ad blockers, but this causes more to use ad blockers so show even more ads.
- mediumsmart 5y ago
  Can't you just switch out the users for bots that watch the ads without adblockers and then gradually switch out the content for ads to keep the growing number of bots busy? That way you can also show really bad ads without anyone complaining. win win.
kyrra 5y ago
Btw, someone wrote up a guide on hosting this on AWS, which covers what it would take to run it yourself. https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-google-tag-manager-aws/ https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-googl... If I'm not mistaken, the key bit is that Google makes the docker image available at: gcr.io/cloud-tagging-10302018/gtm-cloud-image:stable Edit: oh, Google published a guide to self host maybe? https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
criddell 5y ago
> But I understand the business need to measure the effectiveness of marketing money spent. They don’t need to, but they sure want to.
verisimi 5y ago
"Ethical data collection"!
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> marketing departments act ethically Impossible. All marketing is inherently unethical. At best it's got massive conflicts of interest everywhere: who trusts the opinion of someone who's being paid to say good things about a product or service? I want to talk to real humans with real experiences and real opinions, not paid for ads and testimonials. Marketing at its worst is kind of an undefined thing because they reach new lows every day, there's no limit they won't cross. It's gotten to the point I consider advertising to be abuse if not mind rape. We don't tolerate people assuming they have arbitrary access to our bodies, and our attention and cognition are absolutely part of our bodies and deserving of respect.
choose-another 5y ago
>ethical data collection Oxymoron. Hence your need to prefix 'ethical'. >ethically >ethically I am overdosing reading your post; rationalise it however you wish, you're well aware of what you're doing and it's clear no comment I could make would change your mind.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

curiousmindz 5y ago

Sadly, most publishers are not interested in developing their own proxy solution just for the sake of data privacy. They vastly prefer a ready-made solution that they can just use. Much of the power of the advertising space come from people (publishers, consumers and advertisers) generally choosing the path of least resistance. They don't have the technical know-how and they would only acquire it if there were enough benefits. Sadly, privacy is not enough on its own. I think the solution that can solve all that is when a company acts as a "wall" between consumers and publishers/advertisers. Then, that company can protect the consumer while keeping the user experience as simple as possible. "Sign in with Apple" is one such solution. But of course, it brings its own (different) downsides.

deepstack 5y ago

>The problem imho isn't GTM (Google Tagmanager) running as proxy. This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically. At least under one imho essential condition: I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering. Yup that is where rubber meets the road. Would like to offer google as little data as possible. And use as little google products as possible on the web and internet.

andrewingram 5y ago
Sibling comment shares this link, but you can run this in your own infrastructure (this is actually how Segment does server-side publishing to Google Analytics, because until very recently there hasn't been a proper API for it): https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

black_puppydog 5y ago

> the second essential condition that marketing departments act ethically This seems like a pretty strong assumption, given that both an engrained culture, lived experience, and an analysis of the different parties' incentives stand against this. Until we have strong (and crucially, really enforced) legislation against this, I'd say technical means (blocking JS mostly) will be the only thing I'd be willing to bet on.

jacquesm 5y ago

Marketing is almost by definition not going to act ethically: their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one, and the KPIs by which marketing departments are run are proof positive of that. Nobody starts off with 'what would be the natural limit of our product sales', instead they start off with 'what is the total addressable market and how do we maximize our fraction of that' implying that if you are counted in their market that you are fair game whether you like it or not.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one This is reductionist. Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? In a sense. But in another sense, it was broadcasting a better way of being. Marketing doesn’t have to be evil. Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? People were telling each other about these. > Marketing doesn’t have to be evil. No, indeed it doesn't. But as a rule it definitely appears to be. It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is. > Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly. If 99% of the people engaging in an activity are doing it badly then I'm all for reigning them in, in spite of the 1% that are doing a swell job.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is This is a good analogy. In stories, arsenic is almost without fail evil. In reality, it has use in medicine, agriculture and ceramics [1]. > If 99% of the people engaging in an activity are doing it badly then I'm all for reigning them in We agree. And I have no horse in this race. But that 99% figure is largely confined to tech-based marketing. The people painting print ads and planning PR stunts aren’t hurting anyone. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic#Uses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic#Uses

baybal2 5y ago

Just block the script by its checksum, and the issue is solved

beagle3 5y ago
Article addresses this: google is actually encouraging users to modify said script.

janpot 5y ago

> I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. That's not what they're doing, at all. They want to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of maximising profits. That may correlate with good user experience sometimes, but more often it results in the opposite.

franga2000 5y ago
Exactly! A company's goal is profit and most of the time, that does not align with the customer's goals. Amazon's goal is to sell me the highest margin item, I want the best value or highest quality. I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around!
- airstrike 5y ago
  > I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around! As a small aside, The capitalist's answer is that regulating companies to prevent them from steering to the most profitable items is both impossible to be adequately done and prohibitively costly. Even assuming cost isn't an issue, it's hard to imagine such regulation to be equally applied to all market participants (or to be equally effective). So we would be left with companies that cooperate and others that defect, and the defectors would be favored (more profitable) and outcompete the cooperators in the long run. So instead we start from the assumption that companies are greedy and let them compete to offer customers the best value -- and if that value comes (at least in part) from not being tracked, companies that do not track will attract more customers. We probably just haven't made enough of a fuss about it with our dollar-votes. For what it's worth, I block all ads without giving it a single thought. The way I think about it is that on the flip side of the prisoner's dilemma, I'm just defecting like some companies would. It's a race to the bottom in terms of the trust between customers and companies, but I didn't make the rules of the game...

runarberg 5y ago

How effective is tracking in increasing user experience over less invasive techniques, e.g. like asking users?

TZVdosOWs3kZHus 5y ago
This! The most valuable information is collected via classic communication! We include basic opt-in tracking (selectable in our installer) to get information about basic usage untangled to certain users. While this is just a statistical overview, it shows to us which parts of our software get used only for the customers who activated this kind of tracking. The most valuable information we get is through our forum which is open to everyone regardless of whether tracking is activated or not.
pfooti 5y ago
Most companies do both. If just asking users questions was strictly better than passive tracking, that's probably all they'd do - analytics have a real cost to use, that cost wouldn't be paid if the information gathered was useless. But, people are pretty remarkably bad at asking for things. It's mostly the "better horse" problem. People ask for fixes to proximal issues (make this faster, cheaper, better) and not the big things. In my own product, we use gtm to understand where in our sign up funnel people fall off. It is a complicated product and a complicated sign up flow. Since people who fall out of the funnel are unreachable, we can't just ask them why. But we can observe that (say) 40% of users bounce off of step X, so let's make that step easier.

charcircuit 5y ago

>I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering. This is already true. https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

sdoering 5y ago
Thanks - didn't know that. Interesting. Might be a solution for a client of the team I work in (but not my client).

robalni 5y ago

> I don't have a problem with websites measuring what I view, click, add to cart or buy. I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. The problem is not that they measure things. The problem is that they enter the user's private area; they run code on the user's computer and probably grab information about the user too (I don't know exactly how tag managers work because I have never used one). It's like if I enter your home and start measuring things, the problem is not that I measure things, it's that I entered your private area.

sdoering 5y ago
Well actually it is more like they you are entering their store. They are measuring the number of people that come in. The number of items (and what items) these people look at. Add to their basket. How many stand in line at the cashier and how many buy. And how many filled baskets stand in the isles at the end of the day. But - they also could write down the gender of anyone entering the shop. Or the hair color. Or they could note down the license plate of your car. With whom you arrive. The brand of your car. The color. The brands of the clothes you visibly wear. Then they correlate that to the payment method, your Visa card, the credit ranking they receive back from visa (digitally at least). And so on. and they measure how often you return. They could do all of this (and actually a big lot of them does) and not only log that for themselves and do whatever analysis with it, but also send this data happily to the advertising agency that manages the big signs all over town so that they can show you additional advertisements for a new car, because you have money, but your car is old. That is were the problem begins. It begins when doing way too invasive logging of user attributes that do only marginally have anything to do with measuring how the shop (or the website) work. And more so when this data is being sent to who knows whom in this advertising space out there. I have no problem with an online store storing the fact that I came by clicking on a display ad. Or on an email newsletter. Or that I am using Firefox. Or Chrome. And that I am on a WIn10 desktop device. Or that I tend to add a lot of stuff to my shopping cart, wait two hours and then sort what I don't need. I even do not have a problem showing me additional products based on what I looked at in their shop. But to correlate that with offsite data, sending this to advertisers and so on is a no go for me.
collegeburner 5y ago

rvanlaar 5y ago

You're hitting the nail on the head. I'm not against the website owners seeing what I do on their website. What I am against is what other parties are able to do with the data when sold. They're able to correlate website visits with specific businesses and linkedin profiles.

mkdirp 5y ago

> This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically. Most, if not all, tracking is unethical.

yunohn 5y ago

> not done in the way GTM does (only hosting on Google, using an A/AAAA subdomain, grabbing every cookie possibly and so on). It’s provided as a Docker image that you can run anywhere you want. https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

aeyes 5y ago

> But I understand the business need to measure the effectiveness of marketing money spent. Why? They are not able to track TV, newspaper, billboard or radio campaigns but still spend a lot of marketing money on these.

sdoering 5y ago
The are at least quite able to correlate these. Tracking TV advertising'impact is relatively easy and straight forward. Same for out of home advertising. And with a bit more effort attribution to newspaper/magazine advertising is also possible. But. It often isn't necessary. More often than not these forms of advertising are not direct marketing. They don't necessarily have a call to action. They are a branding asset. And brand awareness is measured differently. With different means. So while you can and should measure the direct impact, this isn't the main focus. The same way response and conversion rates on direct marketing efforts were meticulously measured long before the internet. There were even AB tests being run on mailings (snail mail) on test flights to identify the campaigns with the best ROI. I have a booklet from 1978, the year I was born, explaining AB testing for direct marketing campaigns. Except for the speed, nothing changed. Nowadays we only have more intrusive tracking methods if we decide to go that route. But the underlying methods (statistics, measuring success, et al) habe not significantly changed.

achairapart 5y ago

While I agree with the ethical matter, from what I understand Google offered some form of server-side analytics APIs since ages[0]. I know, this is different from this new GTM server-side thing, but nonetheless it already offered technical ways of proxy-tracking data with whatever infrastructure available, also circumventing ad-blockers. This to say that this server-side approach is nothing totally new. I'm sure some big business already implemented it, you can't just easily notice it everywhere like the client-side counterpart. The difference here is that now Google has tinkered some ready made solution, using its own infrastructure. Maybe it's also a matter of convenience: It has always been mostly trivial to setup some JS to collect this data (often, as easy as just pasting a single script tag in your HTML). Once you need App Engine, DNS setup, etc not every business will likely jump into all this technical burden, and this could slow the adoption of the whole server-side tracking. Or maybe not. Who knows. [0]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v4 https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/...

kall 5y ago

On the conversion tracking point, because I just wrote a privacy policy section on this: I just send the conversion event for the ad, but the advertiser almost certainly has all the user info tied to that already, right? I can say "not my department" but still. Of course facebook would prefer you just send it all app events, in perpetuity, just in case.

collegeburner 5y ago

Similarly, I want to be able to show my users ads. They're not really bad ads, but otherwise I lose money on providing service. And then we risk the "youtube paradox": keep showing more ads to your ad watching users so they subsidize the growing number of ad blockers, but this causes more to use ad blockers so show even more ads.

mediumsmart 5y ago
Can't you just switch out the users for bots that watch the ads without adblockers and then gradually switch out the content for ads to keep the growing number of bots busy? That way you can also show really bad ads without anyone complaining. win win.

kyrra 5y ago

Btw, someone wrote up a guide on hosting this on AWS, which covers what it would take to run it yourself. https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-google-tag-manager-aws/ https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-googl... If I'm not mistaken, the key bit is that Google makes the docker image available at: gcr.io/cloud-tagging-10302018/gtm-cloud-image:stable Edit: oh, Google published a guide to self host maybe? https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

criddell 5y ago

> But I understand the business need to measure the effectiveness of marketing money spent. They don’t need to, but they sure want to.

verisimi 5y ago

"Ethical data collection"!

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> marketing departments act ethically Impossible. All marketing is inherently unethical. At best it's got massive conflicts of interest everywhere: who trusts the opinion of someone who's being paid to say good things about a product or service? I want to talk to real humans with real experiences and real opinions, not paid for ads and testimonials. Marketing at its worst is kind of an undefined thing because they reach new lows every day, there's no limit they won't cross. It's gotten to the point I consider advertising to be abuse if not mind rape. We don't tolerate people assuming they have arbitrary access to our bodies, and our attention and cognition are absolutely part of our bodies and deserving of respect.

choose-another 5y ago

>ethical data collection Oxymoron. Hence your need to prefix 'ethical'. >ethically >ethically I am overdosing reading your post; rationalise it however you wish, you're well aware of what you're doing and it's clear no comment I could make would change your mind.

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