Re: Manage analytics through tag manager?

On 1/7/20 10:07, Dave Page wrote:

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 6:42 PM Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 2:22 PM Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 1:07 PM Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 1:55 PM Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

We currently use Google Analytics for analysing traffic on the website, and have done for many years. Whilst discussing some ideas to improve the user experience with Jonathan, it became clear to me that ideally we need outbound link tracking, i.e. what link did a user click that took them away from our site. This is useful to know so we can tell, for example, what download option a user ended up choosing, which can better inform us on how to improve the layout of the download pages.

Whilst it is possible to do outbound link tracking directly in Google Analytics, it can be invasive, requiring onclick attributes on every link. It is (in theory) possible to dynamically add those using a script in the base template or similar, but I've never actually been able to get that to work when I've tried.

Instead, I'd like to suggest we change to using Google Tag Manager directly in the site in place of Analytics. Tag Manager uses a couple of similar JS snippets to Analytics so would require minimal changes to the site. However, it can then be used (amongst many other things) to enable Analytics site-wide as it is now, and to automatically send outbound link clicks to Analytics globally or for subsets of pages and target URLs with no further code changes.

Given the number of sites that completely break and fall over when one blocks GTM, I have to ask: I assume this can be done in a way that has zero impact on those who are sensible enough to block it?

I just tested on a couple of sites using it, and blocking didn't seem to affect use of the sites at all.

That's good.

I'd still say we need a very clear reason for it if we're going to collect more information about our visitors. That is, we need a plan for what we're going to do with the data. If we don't have that, we should not collect it. 

Let's be clear here - we are not, and do not collect information about individual users (unless they sign up for an account of course). 

We collect anonymous usage information that is free of any form of PII that informs us on things like popularity of different pages so we can gauge what works and doesn't work content-wise, browser/device usage so we know what to test with, navigation patterns so we understand how people use our site, and the bit I think is valuable to add; outbound link usage, so we can understand (in the particular case I'm working on) what the popularity of different download options are, particularly those where we do not have any stats at all because they're hosted at third party sites.

    Not sure if with this reply you were also considering what I mentioned in the thread about GA concerns in general, but just in case: concerns about GA are not on what information we'd collect, but rather the information that, thanks to us, Google is collecting. Because this information can be cross-referenced with that from other sites, ads and probably many other sources.

    I'm all in to have usage and statistics information for the website --as long as they don't include PII of course, and only those that are used and reasonable-- but there are many other tools than GA to do this.

Most of that cannot be gained through the very limited amount of server logs we have, and even that which can is not meaningful because they are purged very quickly and only kept for a short while for diagnostics because they do contain PII.

    Actually there is probably much of the information being used now that may be gathered from the logs. But anyway probably other existing tools are better than this.