“iOS tracking update again, what do we have to deal with now?” That is a question a weary marketer might ask, who is being bombarded with constantly changing and harder-to-grasp technology that is affecting the same “simple” reports we are so used to. Expiring first-party cookies, deprecated third-party cookies, faulty attribution, and now URL parameters. What’s next? I think we all agree that user privacy and consent-based tracking are very important features of the Internet. However, these updates tend to evoke emotions from marketers such as uncertainty or even anger when they have to deal ..read more

As a marketer or website owner, it’s crucial to have a complete view of your customer journey across different devices and touchpoints. And even if this is getting harder and harder to do, there are several methods that Google Analytics 4 uses to accomplish this, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at these methods and how they work. Rather watch a video? We’ve got you Identity Spaces Google Analytics uses four different “identity spaces” to track users across devices and platforms. These are user ID, Google signals, device ID, and modeling. Le ..read more

DISCLAIMER We are not lawyers. We don’t give any legal advice. This post should not be taken as legal advice. Please consult with a lawyer and a privacy legislation professional before taking any decisions. The main thing I’ve been discussing with clients over the last few months is: Should we move away from Google Analytics? If yes, to what and why? The reason clients ask this question is two-fold: because of privacy regulations and because of the switch to Google Analytics 4. There is now a new implied risk to using any third party analytics tool, and the switch from Universal Analytics ..read more

The Digital Marketing field is a relatively young but high-growth industry with millions working in it worldwide. Starting in the early ’90s, for the first ±30 years, we’ve seemingly moved in one single direction: gather more and more data about internet users to feed our tools and algorithms . In our enthusiasm , we forgot about privacy. Now, a paradigm shift is upon us. Our beloved tools and techniques are under siege from legislature like the European GDPR and American CCPA , public opinion (fuelled by pop culture documentaries), and even from within Big Tech itself (). But ..read more

We’ve been working with companies to get their digital marketing setup and measure their efforts for over 10 years. After a while, certain patterns start to emerge. In this post, we would like to walk you through 5 distinct stages that we see most companies go through on their journey towards “marketing data maturity”. Hopefully, this post helps you reflect on where you are as a company right now and inspire you to think about the next step. Let’s dive in: Phase 1: A Tool per Task Let’s get the ball rolling! Getting from nothing to something is the hardest part for any business. It’s so tempti ..read more

Many websites use tag management systems to keep all analytics and marketing scripts under control. Tag management systems provide quite an easy way of doing that. However, most of the time, tag managers are loaded client-side – meaning that all the scripts and tags that are installed via these systems are loaded directly in the users’ browser. This means that client-side tagging has two distinct downsides: Negative impact on website performance: as the tag management system loads many scripts and executes many different tags it can have a negative impact on the website’s performance (loading ..read more

Google just launched its new Google Analytics 4 Privacy Settings (which they said they would in their recent webinar, which we wrote about previously). Here’s an overview of what they announced, plus some of our thoughts. You can read the Google Support Page here. What will change? Google (says) they don’t log IP addresses in GA4. Additionally, they claim to drop any sensitive data that it collects from “EU Users” before logging that data via (Google Owned) EU Domains and servers. This means that Google has to figure out who is an EU user, in order to decide whether they will process the data ..read more

This is a question that in our opinion does not get asked enough. Do you actually need Google Analytics? (Or any marketing analytics tool, for that matter.) In a lot of cases, the answer should probably be no. Especially with an increasing “price tag” in the form of privacy legislature that introduces a liability risk to your organization when using tools like Google Analytics without the proper configuration (consent, privacy-enhancing features, etc). From a purely business perspective, the core question is: Can you take action based upon the collected data that will increase your profitabil ..read more

We’re embarking on an exciting new project! Together with Krista Seiden, we’re creating an online learning course about the technical implementation of Google Analytics 4 on her digital learning platform KS Digital Academy. Our goal is to launch the course in April 2022. Learn what the course will be about: Learn how to configure your browser for technical implementation and debugging to make sure your data quality is what you expect it to be. Learn how to configure the Google Analytics 4 Configuration Tag with Event Parameters, User Properties and Fields to Set. Learn how to configure Google ..read more

Google hosted a webinar on 23 March 2022 to talk about privacy features in Google Analytics. They took the stance that Google Analytics can in fact be used within the EU. However, they also committed to create product features that will increase the ability to take privacy more seriously. Furthermore, they reiterated their vision that a political solution like Privacy Shield (which was invalidated by Schrems II) must be recreated in order to move forward. You can read more about Google’s stance on these issues in our (continuously updated) page here. Slide from Google Webinar about their stanc ..read more