Link: Jeremy Keith on tracking
If the outputs generated by tracking turn out to be inaccurate, then shouldn’t they lose their status?
But that line of reasoning shouldn’t even by necessary. We shouldn’t stop tracking users because it’s inaccurate. We should stop stop tracking users because it’s wrong.
Too right.
What’s interesting to me about the changes to Apple Mail are that they might be the factor that finally forces companies and marketers to stop building logs of user location + other things
Chris Coyier wrote a follow-up on CSS Tricks:
I’m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising. I can tell you these things are true:
- I have meetings about pricing where the decisions are based on the historical performance of what is being sold, meaning impressions and clicks.
- The vast majority of first conversations between bag-of-money-holding advertisers and publishers like me, the very first questions I’m asked are about performance metrics.
That feels largely OK to me. When I go to the store to buy walnuts, I want to know how many walnuts I’m going to get for my dollar. I expect the store to price the walnuts based on normal economic factors, like how much they cost and the supply/demand for walnuts. The advertising buyers are the walnut buyers — they want to know what kind of performance an ad is likely to get for their dollar.
What if I said: I don’t know? I don’t know how many people see these ads. I don’t know how many people click these ads. I don’t know where they are from. I don’t know anything at all. And more, you aren’t allowed to know either. You can give me a URL to send them to, but it cannot have tracking params on it and we won’t be tracking the clicks on it.
Would I lose money? I gotta tell you readers: yes. In the short-term, anyway. It’s hard enough to land advertisers as it is. Coming off as standoffish and unwilling to tell them how many walnuts they are going to get for their dollar is going to make them roll their eyes and move on. Long-term, I bet it could be done. Tell advertisers (and the world) up front, very clearly, your stance on user tracking and how it means that you don’t have and won’t provide numbers via tracking. Lean on supply and demand entirely. Price spots at $X to start. If other people have interest in the spot, raise the price until it stops selling, lower the price if it does.
This highlights the dilemma for publishers. If we agree that advertisers are valuing the wrong metrics, how do you change the narrative?
It’ll get there but there are first-mover costs. And by the way, UTMs are probably the best privacy-respecting metric right now.
Jason Kint puts it roughly like this: targeting and measuring ads is possible in a way that’s privacy-focused and within consumer’s expectations (reasonable people can disagree on whether email spy pixels fall under this, but the ICO is quite clear that users need to consent).
“Tracking” across vendors/services, that users wouldn’t know about or expect, falls outside of this. (Apologies to Jason if this mischaracterises his position in any way).
And there’s more to this. Many people don’t realise what’s going on under the hood. Email spy pixels are a good example: marketers know they can collect the data, but might not realise what data is collected, how or the implications of it.
From Chris’s piece:
As I write this, I’m poking around in the reporting section to see what else I can see. Ughghk, guess what? I can literally see exactly who opened the email (by the person’s email address) and which links they clicked. I didn’t even realize that until now, but wow, that’s very super personally identifiable analytics information. I’m going to look into how I can turn that off because it does cross an ethical line for me.
Now, Chris is a smart cookie. He knows code, he knows marketing, he understands how the web works in a way that many people don’t. And he didn’t know this stuff is going on.
This isn’t to say that naïvety makes this fine, but there will be lots of people innocently collecting this data without realising it.
[tracking] is just a prettier word for surveillance.
As Jeremy highlights in his piece, “analytics” can often be substituted for “tracking”. And, as Bob Hoffman notes, “[tracking] is just a prettier word for surveillance.”
No prizes for guessing which of these words features in most SaaS advertising…
This is part of the drive behind Below Radar: help business owners, marketers, freelancers make better choices, understand the options. Yes, it’s grassroots stuff, but we have to start somewhere.