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• Google Analytics Privacy Issues : Is It Really That Bad ?

  2 juin 2022, par Erin

  If you find yourself asking : “What’s the deal with Google Analytics privacy ?”, you probably have some second thoughts. 

  Your hunch is right. Google Analytics (GA) is a popular web analytics tool, but it’s far from being perfect when it comes to respecting users’ privacy. 

  This post helps you understand tremendous Google Analytics privacy concerns users, consumers and regulators expressed over the years.

  In this blog, we’ll cover :

  What Does Google Analytics Collect About Users ? 

  To understand Google Analytics privacy issues, you need to know how Google treats web users’ data. 

  By default, Google Analytics collects the following information : 

  • Session statistics — duration, page(s) viewed, etc. 
  • Referring website details — a link you came through or keyword used. 
  • Approximate geolocation — country, city. 
  • Browser and device information — mobile vs desktop, OS usage, etc. 

  Google obtains web analytics data about users via two means : an on-site Google Analytics tracking code and cookies.

  A cookie is a unique identifier (ID) assigned to each user visiting a web property. Each cookie stores two data items : unique user ID and website name. 

  With the help of cookies, web analytics solutions can recognise returning visitors and track their actions across the website(s).

  

  • First party cookies are generated by one website and collect user behaviour data from said website only. 
  • Third-party cookies are generated by a third-party website object (for example, an ad) and can track user behaviour data across multiple websites. 

  As it’s easy to imagine, third-party cookies are a goldmine for companies selling online ads. Essentially, they allow ad platforms to continue watching how the user navigates the web after clicking a certain link. 

  Yet, people have little clue as to which data they are sharing and how it is being used. Also, user consent to tracking across websites is only marginally guaranteed by existing Google Analytics controls. 

  Why Third-Party Cookie Data Collection By GA Is Problematic 

  Cookies can transmit personally identifiable information (PII) such as name, log in details, IP address, saved payment method and so on. Some of these details can end up with advertisers without consumers’ direct knowledge or consent.

  Regulatory frameworks such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) emerged as a response to uncontrolled user behaviour tracking.

  Under regulatory pressure, Big Tech companies had to adapt their data collection process.

  Apple was the first to implement by-default third-party blocking in the Safari browser. Then added a tracking consent mechanism for iPhone users starting from iOS 15.2 and later. 

  Google, too, said it would drop third-party cookie usage after The European Commission and UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched antitrust investigations into its activity. 

  To shake off the data watchdogs, Google released a Privacy Sandbox — a set of progressive tech, operational and compliance changes for ensuring greater consumer privacy. 

  Google’s biggest promise : deprecate third-party cookies usage for all web and mobile products. 

  Originally, Google promised to drop third-party cookies by 2022, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Google delayed cookie tracking depreciation for Chrome until the second half of 2023. 

  Why did they push back on this despite hefty fines from regulators ?

  Because online ads make Google a lot of money.

  In 2021, Alphabet Inc (parent company of Google), made $256.7 billion in revenue, of which $209.49 billion came from selling advertising. 

  Lax Google Analytics privacy enforcement — and its wide usage by website owners — help Google make those billions from collecting and selling user data. 

  How Google Uses Collected Google Analytics Data for Advertising 

  Over 28 million websites (or roughly 85% of the Internet) have Google Analytics tracking codes installed. 

  Even if one day we get a Google Analytics version without cookies, it still won’t address all the privacy concerns regulators and consumers have. 

  Over the years, Google has accumulated an extensive collection of user data. The company’s engineers used it to build state-of-the-art deep learning models, now employed to build advanced user profiles. 

  Deep learning is the process of training a machine to recognise data patterns. Then this “knowledge” is used to produce highly-accurate predictive insights. The more data you have for model training — the better its future accuracy will be. 

  Google has amassed huge deposits of data from its collection of products — GA, YouTube, Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps among others. Now they are using this data to build a third-party cookies-less alternative mechanism for modelling people’s preferences, habits, lifestyles, etc. 

  Their latest model is called Google Topics. 

  This comes only after Google’s failed attempt to replace cookie-based training with Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) model. But the solution wasn’t offering enough user transparency and user controls among other issues.

  

  Google Topics promises to limit the granularity of data advertisers get about users. 

  But it’s still a web user surveillance method. With Google Topics, the company will continue collecting user data via Chrome (and likely other Google products) — and share it with advertisers. 

  Because as we said before : Google is in the business of profiting off consumers’ data. 

  Two Major Ways Google Takes Advantage of Customer Data

  Every bit of data Google collects across its ecosystem of products can be used in two ways :

  • For ad targeting and personalisation 
  • To improve Google’s products 

  The latter also helps the former. 

  Advanced Ad Personalisation and Targeting

  GA provides the company with ample data on users’ 

  • Recent and frequent searches 
  • Location history
  • Visited websites
  • Used apps 
  • Videos and ads viewed 
  • Personal data like age or gender 

  The company’s privacy policy explicitly states that :
  

  

  Google also admits to using collected data to “measure the effectiveness of advertising” and “personalise content and ads you see on Google.” 

  But there are no further elaborations on how exactly customers’ data is used — and what you can do to prevent it from being shared with third parties. 

  In some cases, Google also “forgets” to inform users about its in-product tracking.

  Journalists from CNBC and The New York Times independently concluded that Google monitors users’ Gmail activity. In particular, the company scans your inbox for recent purchases, trips, flights and bills notifications. 

  While Google says that this information isn’t sold to advertisers (directly), they still may use the “saved information about your orders in other Google services”. 

  Once again, this means you have little control or knowledge of subsequent data usage. 

  Improving Product Usability 

  Google has many “arms” to collect different data points — from user’s search history to frequently-travelled physical routes. 

  They also reserve the right to use these insights for improving existing products. 

  Here’s what it means : by combining different types of data points obtained from various products, Google can pierce a detailed picture of a person’s life. Even if such user profile data is anonymised, it is still alarmingly accurate. 

  Douglas Schmidt, a computer science researcher at Vanderbilt University, well summarised the matter : 

  “[Google’s] business model is to collect as much data about you as possible and cross-correlate it so they can try to link your online persona with your offline persona. This tracking is just absolutely essential to their business. ‘Surveillance capitalism’ is a perfect phrase for it.”

  Google Data Collection Obsession Is Backed Into Its Business Model 

  OK, but Google offers some privacy controls to users ? Yes. Google only sees and uses the information you voluntarily enter or permit them to access. 

  But as the Washington Post correspondent points out :

  “[Big Tech] companies get to set all the rules, as long as they run those rules by consumers in convoluted terms of service that even those capable of decoding the legalistic language rarely bother to read. Other mechanisms for notice and consent, such as opt-outs and opt-ins, create similar problems. Control for the consumer is mostly an illusion.”

  Google openly claims to be “one of many ad networks that personalise ads based on your activity online”. 

  The wrinkle is that they have more data than all other advertising networks (arguably combined). This helps Google sell high-precision targeting and contextually personalised ads for billions of dollars annually.

  Given that Google has stakes in so many products — it’s really hard to de-Google your business and minimise tracking and data collection from the company.
  

  They are also creating a monopoly on data collection and ownership. This fact makes regulators concerned. The 2021 antitrust lawsuit from the European Commission says : 

  “The formal investigation will notably examine whether Google is distorting competition by restricting access by third parties to user data for advertising purposes on websites and apps while reserving such data for its own use.”

  In other words : By using consumer data to its unfair advantage, Google allegedly shuts off competition.

  But that’s not the only matter worrying regulators and consumers alike. Over the years, Google also received numerous other lawsuits for breaching people’s privacy, over and over again. 

  Here’s a timeline : 

  • 2019 : UK citizens issued a class action suit against Google for imposing cookies to override users’ privacy settings in the Safari browser. 
  • 2020 : US citizens pushed for a $5 billion class-action suit for tracking their activity through browsers set in “private” mode.
  • 2022 : Another class-action lawsuit in the US for deceptive privacy controls and unconsented location data tracking by Google mobile apps. 
  • 2022 : Google reached a $100 million class-action settlement for breaching Illinois biometrics privacy laws in Google Photos. 

  Separately, Google has a very complex history with GDPR compliance. 

  How Google Analytics Contributes to the Web Privacy Problem 

  Google Analytics is the key puzzle piece that supports Google’s data-driven business model. 

  If Google was to release a privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative, it’d lose access to valuable web users’ data and a big portion of digital ad revenues. 

  Remember : Google collects more data than it shares with web analytics users and advertisers. But they keep a lot of it for personal usage — and keep looking for ways to share this intel with advertisers (in a way that keeps regulators off their tail).

  For Google Analytics to become truly ethical and privacy-focused, Google would need to change their entire revenue model — which is something they are unlikely to do.

  Where does this leave Google Analytics users ? 

  In a slippery territory. By proxy, companies using GA are complicit with Google’s shady data collection and usage practice. They become part of the problem.

  In fact, Google Analytics usage opens a business to two types of risks : 

  • Reputational. 77% of global consumers say that transparency around how data is collected and used is important to them when interacting with different brands. That’s why data breaches and data misuse by brands lead to major public outrages on social media and boycotts in some cases. 
  • Legal. EU regulators are on a continuous crusade against Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as it is in breach of GDPR. French and Austrian watchdogs ruled the “service” illegal. Since Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant, it opens any business using it to lawsuits (which is already happening).

  But there’s a way out.

  Choose a Privacy-Friendly Google Analytics Alternative 

  Google Analytics is a popular web analytics service, but not the only one available. You have alternatives such as Matomo. 

  Our guiding principle is : respecting privacy.

  Unlike Google Analytics, we leave data ownership 100% in users’ hands. Matomo lets you implement privacy-centred controls for user data collection.

  Plus, you can self-host Matomo On-Premise or choose Matomo Cloud with data securely stored in the EU and in compliance with GDPR.

  The best part ? You can try our ethical alternative to Google Analytics for free. No credit card required ! Start your free 21-day trial now. 

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

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  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  

  » Start improving your websites now

  

• How to Measure Marketing Effectiveness : A Step-by-Step Guide

  22 février 2024, par Erin

  Are you struggling to prove that your marketing efforts are having a measurable impact on your company’s performance ? We get it. 

  You would think that digital marketing would make it easier to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. But in many ways, it’s harder than ever. With so many channels and strategies competing against each other, it can feel impossible to pin down the campaign that caused a conversion. 

  That leaves you in a tricky spot as a marketing manager. It can be hard to know which campaigns to persevere with and harder still to prove your worth to stakeholders. 

  Thankfully, there are several strategies you can use to measure the success of your campaigns and put a value on your efforts. So, if you want to learn how you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing, improve the ROI of your efforts and prove your value as an employee, read on. 

  What is marketing effectiveness ?

  Marketing effectiveness measures how successful a marketing strategy or campaign is and the extent to which it achieves goals and business objectives.

  

  It’s a growing concern for brands, with research showing that 61.2% say measuring marketing effectiveness has become a more prominent factor in decision-making over the last three years. In other words, it’s becoming critical for marketers to know how to measure their effectiveness. 

  But it’s getting harder to do so. A combination of factors, including channel fragmentation, increasingly convoluted customer journeys, and the deprecation of third-party cookies, makes it hard for marketing teams to measure marketing performance. 

  Why you need to measure marketing effectiveness

  Imagine ploughing thousands of dollars into a campaign and not being confident that your efforts bore fruit. It’s unthinkable, right ? If you care about optimising campaigns and improving your worth as a marketer, measuring marketing effectiveness is necessary. 

  

  Optimise marketing campaigns

  Do you know how effectively each campaign generates conversions and drives revenue ? No ? Then, you need to measure marketing effectiveness.

  Doing so could also shine a light on ways to improve your campaigns. One paid ad campaign may suffer from a poor return on ad spend caused by high CPCs. Targeting less competitive keywords could dramatically reduce your costs. 

  Improve ROI

  Today, marketing budgets make up almost 10% of a company’s total revenue, up from 6.4% in 2021. With so much revenue at stake, you’ve got to deliver a return on that investment. 

  Measuring marketing effectiveness can help you identify the campaigns or strategies delivering the highest ROI so you can invest more heavily into them. On the other side of the same coin, you can use the data to strike off any campaigns that aren’t pulling their weight — increasing your ROI even further. 

  Demonstrate value

  Let’s get selfish for a second. Whether you’re an in-house marketing manager or work for an agency, the security of your paycheck depends on your ability to deliver high-ROI campaigns. 

  Measuring your marketing effectiveness lets you showcase your value to your company and clients. It helps you build stronger relationships that can lead to bigger and better opportunities in the future. 

  We should take this opportunity to point out that a good tool for measuring marketing effectiveness is equally important. You probably think Google Analytics will do the job, right ? But when you start implementing the strategies we discuss below, there’s a good chance you’ll have data quality issues. 

  That was the case for full-service marketing agency MHP/Team SI, which found Google Analytics’ data sampling severely limited the quantity and quality of insights they could collect. It was only by switching to Matomo, a platform that doesn’t use data sampling, that the agency could deliver the insights its clients needed to grow. 

  Further reading :

  • How to check website traffic as accurately as possible
  • 8 best tools to analyse website traffic

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  How to measure marketing effectiveness

  Measuring marketing effectiveness is not always easy, especially if you have long buying cycles and a lack of good-quality data. Make things as easy as possible by following the steps below :

  Know what success looks like

  You can’t tell whether your campaigns are effective if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve. That’s why the first step in measuring marketing effectiveness is to set a clear goal. 

  So, ask yourself what success looks like for each campaign you launch. 

  Remember, a campaign doesn’t have to drive leads to be considered effective. If all you wanted to do was raise brand awareness or increase organic traffic, you could achieve both goals without recording a single conversion. 

  We’d wager that’s probably not true for most marketing managers. It’s much more likely you want to achieve something like the following :

  • Generating 100 new customers
  • Increasing revenue by 20%
  • Selling $5,000 of your new product line
  • Reducing customer churn by 50%
  • Achieving a return on ad spend of 150%

  Conventional goal-setting wisdom applies here. So, ensure your goals are measurable, timely, relevant and achievable. 

  Track conversions

  Setting up conversion tracking in your web analytics platform is vital to measuring marketing effectiveness accurately. 

  What you count as a conversion event will depend on the goals you’ve set above. It doesn’t have to be a sale, mind you. Downloading an ebook or signing up for a webinar are worthy conversion goals, especially if you know they increase the chances of a customer converting. 

  

  Whichever platform you choose, ensure it can meet your current and future needs. This is one of the reasons open-source content management system Concrete CMS opted for Matomo when choosing a new website analytics platform. The flexibility of the Matomo platform gave Concrete CMS the adaptability it needed for future growth. 

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  Decide on an attribution model

  Marketing attribution is a way of measuring the impact of different channels and touchpoints across the customer journey. If you can assign a value to each conversion, you can use a marketing attribution model to quantify the value of your channels and campaigns.

  While most web analytics platforms simply credit the last touchpoint, marketing attribution offers a more comprehensive view by considering all interactions along the customer journey. This distinction is important because relying solely on the last touchpoint can lead to skewed insights and misallocation of resources and budget. 

  By adopting a marketing attribution approach, you can make more informed decisions, optimizing your campaigns and maximizing your return on investment.

  

  There are several different attribution models you can use to give credit to your various campaigns. These include :

  • First interaction : Gives all the credit to the first channel in the customer journey.
  • Last interaction : Gives all the credit to the last channel in the customer journey.
  • Last non-direct attribution : Gives all credit to the final touchpoint in the customer journey, except for direct interactions. In those cases, credit is given to the touchpoint just before the direct one.
  • Linear attribution : Distributes credit equally across all touchpoints.
  • Position-based attribution : Attributes 40% credit to the first and last touchpoints and distributes the remaining 20% evenly across all other touchpoints. 

  Consider carefully which attribution model to use, as this can significantly impact your marketing effectiveness calculation by giving certain campaigns too much credit.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  Analyse KPIs

  Tracking KPIs is essential if you want to quantify the impact of your marketing campaigns. But which metrics should you track ?

  To improve brand awareness or traffic, so-called vanity metrics like sessions, returning visitors, and organic traffic may suffice as KPIs. 

  However, that’s not going to be the case for most marketers, whose performance is tied to revenue and ROI. If that’s you, put vanity metrics to one side and focus on the following conversion metrics instead :

  • Conversion rate : the percentage of users who complete a desired action. 
  • Return on ad spend : the revenue earned for every dollar spent on a campaign.
  • Return on investment : a broader calculation than ROAS, typically calculated across all your marketing efforts. 
  • Customer lifetime value : the total amount a customer will spend throughout their relationship with your company.
  • Customer acquisition cost : the cost to acquire each customer on average.

  

  Your analytics platform and advertising tools should track most of these KPIs by default. Matomo, for instance, automatically calculates your conversion rate in the Goals report. 

  How to present your marketing effectiveness

  Calculating your marketing effectiveness is one thing, but it’s important to share this information with stakeholders — whether those are executives in your company or your agency’s clients. 

  Follow the steps below to create an insightful and compelling marketing report :

  • Set the scene. There’s no guarantee that the people reading your report will know your goals. So, add context at the start of the reporting by spelling out what you are trying to achieve and why. 
  • Select the right data. You don’t want to overwhelm the reader with facts and figures, but you do need to provide hard evidence of your success. Include the KPIs you used to measure your success and show how these have changed over time. You can also support your report with audience insights such as heatmaps or customer surveys.
  • Tell a story with your presentation. Give your presentation a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end. Start with what you want to achieve, describe how you plan to achieve it and end with the results. Support your story with graphs and other visual aids that hold your reader’s attention. 
  • Provide a concise summary. Not everyone will read your presentation cover to cover. With that in mind, provide a summary of your report at the start or end that shows what you achieved and quantifies your marketing effectiveness. 

  How to improve marketing effectiveness

  Don’t settle for simply measuring your marketing effectiveness. Use the following strategies to make future campaigns as effective as possible. 

  Understand customer behaviour

  More effective marketing campaigns start by deeply understanding your customers, who they are, and how they behave. This allows you to take an audience-first approach to your marketing efforts and design campaigns around the unique needs of your customers. 

  Gather as much first-party data as you can. Surveys, focus groups, and other market research techniques can help you learn more about who your customers are, but don’t disregard the quantitative data you can gather from your web analytics platform. 

  Using Heatmaps, Session Recordings and behavioural analytics tools, you can learn exactly how customers behave when they land on your site, where they focus their attention and which pages they look at first. 

  

  These insights can help you turn an average campaign into an exceptional one. For example, a heatmap may highlight the need to move CTA buttons above the fold to increase conversions. A session recording could pinpoint the problems users have when filling out your website’s forms. 

  Further reading :

  • What Is Behavioural Analytics & How Can It Improve Website Performance
  • 9 Form Optimisation Tips to Convert More Visitors
  • How to Increase Conversions with Form Analysis

  Optimise landing pages

  Developing a culture of testing and experimentation is a great way to improve your marketing effectiveness. Let’s dive into A/B testing.

  By tweaking various elements of your landing pages, you can squeeze every last conversion from your campaigns.

  

  We have a guide on conversion funnel optimisation, which we recommend you check out, but I’ll briefly list some of the optimisations you could test :

  • Making your CTAs actionable and compelling
  • Integrating images and videos
  • Adding testimonials and other forms of social proof
  • Reducing form fields

  Use a different attribution model

  It might be that some campaigns, strategies or traffic sources aren’t getting the love they deserve. By changing your attribution model, you can significantly change the perceived effectiveness of certain campaigns. 

  Let’s say you use a last-touch attribution model, for instance. Only the last channel customers will get credit for each conversion, meaning top-of-the-funnel campaigns like SEO may be deemed less effective than they are. 

  It’s why you must continually test, tweak and validate your chosen model — and why changing it can be so powerful. 

  Measure your marketing effectiveness with Matomo

  Measuring your marketing effectiveness is hard work. But it’s vital to optimise campaigns, improve your ROI and demonstrate your value. 

  The good news is that Matomo makes things a lot easier thanks to its comprehensive conversion tracking, attribution modelling capabilities and behavioural insight features like Heatmaps, A/B Testing and Session Recordings. 

  Take steps today to start measuring (and improving) the effectiveness of your marketing with our 21-day free trial. No credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

  
  

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• Revision 32594 : plugins en minuscules, et alias pour les noms de sites

  1er novembre 2009, par fil@… — Log

  plugins en minuscules, et alias pour les noms de sites