Google Analytics Declining in Effectiveness because of GDPR and Apple

 

What is Google doing to Mitigate the Issue

There is a real limit to what Google can do. This is in part because anything they do on a personal level will require users to agree to cookies, and because those cookies will largely be blocked by the other major browsers from Apple, Mozilla, Brave and any with privacy plugins or corporate security measures installed.

 

There is the potential for Google to remove entirely capturing personal information, or any personal identifiable information, but that massively undermines the whole proposition of GA, and is not what brand owners are looking for. 

 

Crucially neither of those initiatives will result in all the audience being tracked, nor provide the level of insight into audience behaviour which is required by the brand owners.

 

Affino already delivers the Most Accurate Audience Traffic and Engagement Stats

 

Over the years we have invested heavily in capturing and presenting the key site statistics in Affino. We focused last year on rolling out actionable analytics throughout Affino, meaning that brand owners, marketers, sales teams, security managers, authors and editors all had far more ready access to all the site engagement and interaction stats.

 

We rolled out core analytics reports including the article and account reports, and moved forward Affino’s sales and marketing automation, built on top of the automated customer ladder and conversion events, with many new automations, more triggers, and scalability.

 

This year we have been focused on standardising all the statistics and reports across Affino. Since they were originally rolled out using their own underlying data sets, moving them all to the same underlying data set and time-based reporting has been a major undertaking.

 

The Key steps we’re making to improve Stats in Affino

The next Affino release sees a number of key improvements in Affino stats and how they are captured and aggregated.

 

The first update is that we’re making it very simple to Accept cookies, or to Manage them (we have to make both really easy to be GDPR compliant, i.e. can’t favour one over the other). For this dialogue to be presented to the user, you simply need to change your cookie policy and the dialogue will be re-presented to the user .

 

We are also capturing far more detailed statistics on Accounts, Editions, Videos, Podcasts and Media library content in general. These all then benefit from the core actionable analytics capabilities so that you can see what the stats are, the referers, which accounts and contacts are viewing the content, and optionally add those to specific contact lists. You can also see the overall reach and average daily reach for each content type.

 

We are additionally rolling out an enhanced bot detection engine into the message campaign stats to better exclude bots from message reads.

 

In the following release, we’ll be extending each of those further, adding read v viewed for articles, watched v impressions for videos and listened to v impressions for podcasts. We’ll also have better presentation of the download stats for PDFs and documents.

 

We are furthermore adding a host of new conversion event triggers around media, and content interactions, to further drive your marketing automation and audience profiling.

 

Later this year / early next, we will be rolling out the 3D interest graphs, with the new topic analytics and insights.

 

All the while minimising as far as possible the data load on your sites and ensuring that they are as fast and responsive as possible, while still providing in-depth analytics and insight.

 

That way you will have incredible insight into your audience and the value and impact of your content, with no drop-off in your ability to track the engagement with your content.

 

For insight into setting up the Cookie Preferences to open up when the user hits the page, please see the related help guide and FAQ, and for more insights in to Affino’s analytics as a whole there are a number of release posts also to explore.

 

If you want a more in-depth conversation with myself, or a member of the product team then reach out to us through the forum, or to me directly, and we can explore how best to get you the insights you need.