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Author: David Fransen

Should You Switch to Google Analytics 4?
Key Insights:
- A new version of Analytics is available and comes with some major changes.
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is more beneficial to those with both website and app properties to track together than for website-only users.
- We recommend setting up both old (Universal) and new (GA4) properties to run concurrently and change over fully only when that seems comfortable for the user and situation.
In October 2020, Google officially launched its new form of Google Analytics properties known as GA4. GA4 originates from the integrated “App + Web” properties, which Google rolled out as an option for Universal Analytics properties years ago, but GA4 makes App + Web configuration the standard for all online properties. If the prior iterations of Google Analytics were variations on a theme, then GA4 is a completely different song.

Since many businesses depend on Google Analytics data to assess their success and address the user experience of their online properties, any major change to the platform will have a significant impact. In this post, we’ll look at the details behind some of those changes and help you determine if the transition to GA4 is immediately beneficial to you.

What Makes GA4 Such a Major Change?

The major, fundamental difference between GA4 and prior Google Analytics versions comes down to reporting mechanisms.

Prior versions of Google Analytics treated Pageviews as the primary metric for web property activity reporting, with a Session as the primary identifier for an individual user’s path. This measurement and reporting was based entirely on data stored in browser cookies. There are many, many resources for a thorough technical breakdown of how Universal Analytics and prior Analytics versions define and utilize Sessions and Pageviews and how they used cookies to collect that data.

For our purposes here, we need to know that Google defined Sessions as an activity reported via a browser cookie from one browser (interpreted as a “user”) before either removal of the Analytics tracking cookie or 30 minutes of inactivity on the reporting website. Within that basic Session framework, the reporting on that user’s activity centered on Pageviews, with user-defined Events as an auxiliary means to target and measure specific user actions. You could find plenty of data about your users’ paths to and across your web properties without using Event measurement at all.

The key conceptual change with GA4 is that Google made Events the foundational metric of reporting, with a Pageview treated as a specific type of Event rather than a separate entity. While GA4 still measures Sessions (and still utilizes browser cookies to do so), the identification of distinct users and their activity is no longer as dependent on cookies or Sessions to organize web activity. Instead, GA4 primarily uses data pulled from device identifiers and contextual Event analysis to identify distinct users and align them with their measured activity on a website or app.

If you are using Analytics for reporting on a single website with no connected applications or alternate platforms, this change is likely only relevant to your developers. But if you are using Analytics to track app activity, you’ll have cleaner data that’s more representative of how users interact with applications without that data tracking being reverse engineered to fit the way users interact with a standard website in a browser.

There are many other changes to reporting and measurement, and the most significant changes are broken down thoroughly by Bounteous. Likewise, the structure and nature of Event and Conversion reporting have changed a great deal, which earned the full Simo Ahava treatment shortly after launch last year.

Why Make This Major Change Now?

The biggest reason for these changes is to unify and consolidate Analytics tracking across multiple distinct web properties. The most obvious and direct use case is the fact that GA4 was directly born out of the App + Web property versions.

Important background for the GA4 changes from the website tracking perspective goes back to the ongoing browser wars against cookies and cross-site tracking. Browsers’ evolving approaches toward user privacy and cookie policies constitute an entirely separate can of worms, but relying less on browser cookies is definitely a solid future-facing plan given the way browsers, internet software, and devices have trended toward greater privacy considerations. We have gone into great depth previously about how changing cookie and privacy policies impact cookie-based Google Analytics tracking.

Google’s continued use of cookies for Analytics tracking in GA4—combined with the fact that, in most cases, the Google Analytics cookie is not being set as a dreaded third-party cookie—means that the actual difference in tracking capabilities for traditional websites is insignificant.

Concepts like Sessions and Pageviews don’t apply to apps the same way they do to websites because of how these online properties are built and used. GA4’s biggest and most impactful immediate step forward is establishing a unified measurement system across these contrasting user platforms.

While we’re still learning the capabilities and possibilities with the new GA4 properties, it’s difficult to point to any clear advantage of using the new GA4 properties for website-only organizations at this stage.

Change Is Good Though, Right?

There are a few specific changes that are causing significant adjustments for working with our clients’ tracking and reporting at Search Influence so far:

User Explorer takes a full 24 hours to populate with user data.

User Explorer has been a huge piece of our testing and QA process for our clients when testing ad campaigns, especially E-commerce Tracking. It lists site users by an anonymized identifier known as a “client ID,” showing the full activity history of each user, including:
- Session breaks
- Goal completions
- E-commerce transactions via E-commerce Tracking
There’s no way to identify a specific user just by looking at the client ID in your reports. But if you are the user and note your own client ID as you’re using the website, you can see what Google sees, which is extremely helpful in ensuring Goals and transactions are reporting properly.

In the past, this User Explorer data was usually available to view within 10-20 minutes of performing the activity. If we had to test E-commerce Tracking reporting for a test purchase on a client’s website, we could complete the transaction and expect to see whether or not it tracked correctly pretty quickly. If it did, great! If it didn’t, we could investigate, adjust, and try again almost immediately.

Currently, in GA4, it takes a full 24 hours for User Explorer data to populate. The results of this can dramatically slow down the process of setting up complex tracking configurations. With GA4, we cannot verify if anything is working until a full day after our tests. If something is not reporting as expected, the best-case scenario is making quick updates and performing another test…and then waiting another 24 hours to see if our adjustments solved the problem. What previously could have been 30 minutes to an hour of work now is spread across at least two full days.

Many previously standard dashboard reporting sections need to be manually configured.

For detailed breakdowns of specific dashboard and reporting changes in GA4 vs. Universal Analytics, Krista Seiden has already broken it down more thoroughly than I could. A general takeaway from what we’ve experienced so far is that many reports and metrics combinations that were accessible options straight from the dashboard menu now need to be set up directly by the user. I think in the long term, this will end up being a good thing since the Universal Analytics dashboard had gotten a bit bloated and overwhelming. But we could access several important reports for client reporting purposes “out of the box” that now need to be “manually” generated by modifying options and dimensions for other more general reports.

Eventually, this will be beneficial, as it’ll allow users to have more control over what they can see and help them understand what data they see.

So, Should I Use GA4 or Not?

The short answer here is a clear and resounding, “Probably, but don’t completely flip out about it just yet.” There is little doubt that GA4 will eventually replace Universal Analytics as the standard, and as such, it’s appropriate to start considering a transition to the new property type. For organizations trying to unify reporting across websites and apps, some immediate benefits might accelerate the payoff of using the newer version.

But for website-only businesses and content creators, the immediate benefits of transitioning to the new properties seem pretty marginal, with a lot of organizational strain engrained in adjusting to the new configurations and reporting structure. All Analytics users were forcibly transitioned from Classic Analytics to Universal Analytics in 2016, but as of now, Classic Analytics tracking code and syntax still fundamentally work and report effectively. The situations are not directly analogous, but it’s highly unlikely that Universal Analytics will be deprecated to any meaningful extent any time soon.

In my opinion, the better immediate option (and what we’re beginning to employ for new clients and strategize for existing clients at Search Influence) is to track Universal Analytics properties and GA4 properties concurrently.

One of the benefits of GA4 and Universal Analytics being entirely separate properties that don’t acknowledge or interfere with each other is that we can set up both to report simultaneously without any conflicts. This allows us to monitor and learn about the differences between the properties without any major irreversible overhaul to what we already have set up for our clients.

Once we’re confident that we’re getting everything we need from GA4 so that Universal Analytics is truly redundant, we can then pull the trigger on switching fully. By that point, we’ll already have accumulated some reporting data to avoid any unfillable gaps in comparative historical data.

To see our most recent thoughts on how to handle the release of GA4, check out this blog post written by our CEO Will Scott.

Whether you’re trying to decide if your business should make the move to GA4 or want to brush up on your analytics and lead tracking, Search Influence is ready to help! Reach out to one of our digital marketing consultants for a free strategy session.

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August 3, 2021
Real World Considerations for Google Analytics E-commerce Tracking

It’s 2020, and there’s no shortage of instructional guides to setting up Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking on your website. If you’re looking for detailed technical information on setting it up yourself, there’s no way I would ever outdo Simo Ahava’s guide to setting up Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking in Google Tag Manager. And Google’s own support documentation naturally offers some pretty helpful guidelines and syntax itself.

What I can hopefully shed some light on is why—despite all these brilliant and freely available resources on the subject—your developer is always making noise about all the problems with setting up Ecommerce Tracking for you. In addition, we’ll look at some recommendations for assessing platforms and plugins when considering options for your site. If your developer is whining about issues with Ecommerce Tracking, it’s probably not because they are being lazy or cranky! Or at least it’s probably not just that.

So What’s the Big Hassle With Setting Up Ecommerce Tracking?

I know, I know. When you set up your basic Google Analytics tracking code, it was so easy! All you had to do was copy and paste the code from Google into a script section in your website’s backend. It took like 5 minutes, and anyone can do it!

Well, unlike most other aspects of Google Analytics tracking, the code and configuration for Ecommerce Tracking has to actually communicate with your website’s functionality in order to collect the actual e-commerce reporting data. That is to say basic pageview-oriented tracking code is adding reporting functionality to your website, so it doesn’t need to care how your website works as long as it loads. Once the tracking code is there, the reporting information flow is more between Google and the site user’s browser, not so much the site itself. But Ecommerce Tracking code has to get transaction data from your website’s backend e-commerce functionality.

When an e-commerce customer completes a purchase, the user simply reaches a confirmation page and probably sees some kind of thank you message and general order info. Behind the scenes, though, the website is processing the items in the user’s cart, updating your site/shop’s inventory, processing a payment, sending confirmation emails, and all kinds of other things depending on what you sell and what your process is. The user doesn’t see all of that, and—crucially—neither does Google or the user’s browser unless you want them to. In the case of Ecommerce Tracking, we want Google to get some of that information that wouldn’t otherwise be readily available. That requires your developer to pull some elements of those backend processes and reformat them into frontend-accessible code that Google can read and transmit to its Ecommerce Tracking platform.

OK Fine, So Our Developers Have to Write Some Code. That’s What We Pay Them For.

Yes, that’s true. And we’re all generally very pleased with that arrangement. But with all the different options and possible combinations of CMSes and e-commerce platforms and plugins and modules and so on and so on, there’s no hard and fast rule for how or if pulling data from an e-commerce platform is possible in real-world configurations. And modifying someone else’s platform or plugin directly, even if you know exactly what you’re doing, can have major unexpected ramifications as other auxiliary platforms and plugins get updated and integrated by their original creators.

The whole point of Ecommerce Tracking is to be able to track how the ultimate purchases actually got to the point of purchase. You already know what you sold and how much it cost the user by the very fact that you sold it. Google’s Ecommerce Tracking allows you to compartmentalize how many paying users or what percentage of your transactions come from organic search vs. ads vs. social media vs. emails and so forth. And in order to do that, Google needs to be able to follow the user from arrival to the site all the way to completion of purchase, at which point it needs additional, more granular information transferred from the backend payment processing system itself. And the more differently specialized cooks you have working in the same kitchen that is your user’s arrival-through-purchase experience, the more difficult it is to come out of it with a decent data feast. As a bonus to this blog post, you have full permission to borrow that tortured analogy, compliments of the chef.

I’ll reference a specific recent example our team encountered to illustrate my point. One of our clients came to us regarding a campaign that was going to be very dependent on Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking, arriving with a freshly built WordPress site, which used the MonsterInsights plugin for general Google Analytics tracking and the WooCommerce platform for their e-commerce online sales. Both of these are very solid, well-maintained, and extremely widely used platforms, and namechecking them here is not meant as criticism. Meanwhile, WooCommerce had a plugin extension installed to integrate the on-site e-commerce functionality with an external calendar booking platform, which manages attendance stats and served as a sort of CRM for the client internally. The calendar booking platform/CRM had its own internal configuration for Google Analytics, which was essentially a black box to me as an outside developer for completely understandable security and privacy reasons.

Hey, That’s a Bunch of Different Things

It sure is! If you’re mapping this out at home, we have MonsterInsights initially establishing tracking for the user. From there, when a user goes to pay for something, they arrive at WooCommerce, which then has to transmit data via an additional add-on plugin to an external booking platform. The booking platform then sends its information back to the WooCommerce add-on plugin, back to “WooCommerce proper” for processing, (which, of course, generally involves additional add-on plugins for specific payment options), and only THEN does a user arrive at the checkout confirmation page where the net results of that path are supposed to be sent to Google Analytics for reporting.

The obvious way to approach Ecommerce Tracking for a WordPress site with WooCommerce is to add an WooCommerce plugin extension for Google Analytics integration. And that’s what we tried to do, except that it turns out that the WooCommerce Analytics extension’s tracking didn’t play nicely with the preexisting base analytics tracking set up through MonsterInsights. If this is already getting tiresome and technical speak makes you nauseated, just ignore this part, but MonsterInsights sets its own unique tracker name for its Analytics tracking. Since WooCommerce does not, the Analytics clientId that identifies users in their path through a website were getting effectively reset as soon as WooCommerce would fire its e-commerce data for reporting. For more on custom trackers, here’s Google’s breakdown.

I could go through about 10 more steps of trial and error and frustration here, but I think the bigger point is probably clear enough: while many of those different plugins and extensions and booking platforms can absolutely make one piece of your website setup and maintenance much easier, they frequently do not care about each other. They do the thing they do very well, but they don’t always account for the bigger picture considerations of running an e-commerce website, much less a business with various other tentacles, where the e-commerce functionality is only a single, modest aspect of the services offered in full. So setting up a way to make all of these divergent elements successfully and accurately transfer user tracking information is often just a long game of tracking error whack-a-mole, depending on the preexisting configurations in question.

What Can We Do To Avoid E-commerce Problems?

We can’t make all of these plugins and external modules do exactly what we want exactly when we want it. But we can think about what we ultimately want to accomplish with our websites and ask the right questions before going whole-hog tying all of our operations to something that may not support many of the things we may want to accomplish down the line:

Do we really need a plugin for this?

There are many very basic processes and configurations you can perform both without a plugin and without any real development knowledge. No disrespect to MonsterInsights or any other Analytics plugins, which offer plenty of advanced features and options that can be incredibly useful in specific situations, but if all you need from your initial Google Analytics setup is standard pageview tracking, you can probably install that yourself without a plugin. If you can copy and paste your Google Analytics tracking ID into a plugin, you can generally just as easily copy and paste the base Google Analytics tracking code. Google Analytics is an obvious example of this, but many other platforms have associated plugins they love to promote for ease of use, which are ultimately just allowing you to copy and paste one thing instead of another. The fewer plugins and extensions you are tied to, the easier it is to revise or expand your configuration in the future. As an added bonus, using fewer plugins will usually make your site faster and more secure as well.

If we do need a plugin, what kind of external integrations are available?

In the context of this post, obviously we’re primarily concerned with whether a platform would integrate with Google Analytics, which is generally simple enough to establish. But don’t just look for the specific things you need at this particular moment when investigating available integrations. Try to get a feel for how many and what types of outside integrations any new platform offers. Just because you’re not using something like Zapier or Automate.io or Mailchimp or whatever it is right now, doesn’t mean you won’t find a need for it down the road. If a new plugin or platform is proudly featuring a wide array of different external integrations, that can be a good indication that the platform will be flexible in accommodating a variety of different use cases and will limit you less as you expand your marketing efforts or your business as a whole.

Be very wary of any platform assuring you that you don’t need those outside integrations because it gives you all the tracking analytics and other features you need right there in its own dashboard. That is an easy path to finding yourself trapped with limited functionality and unreliable data about your website and your business as a whole. I once logged into an unfamiliar external platform used by a client and was greeted with an enthusiastic congratulatory message highlighting the fact that according to their analytics, the client had received 3 times as many new site visitors as total site visitors in the previous reporting period. Unless this platform’s developers unearthed a magical transcendent code library that can report on website interactions with the hidden spirit world, that math does not work out and that analytics data point isn’t reliable. There’s a level of transparency to the way a platform on the scale of Google Analytics records and reports data that you’re unlikely to find in a random calendar widget’s dashboard screen.

Is it really that important to use an e-commerce platform that works with Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking anyway?

Yes! It’s 2020. We’re disappointed that we don’t microchip brain implant video games and rocket boots. Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking has been around for a long time and should be a baseline expectation for any ticketing or e-commerce platform to have fully integrated into its native functionality. If your e-commerce or ticketing provider doesn’t recognize the importance and ever-increasingly broad usage of Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking, it probably isn’t going to be very attentive to other future needs as your business or marketing plans expand, either. Even if you can find ways around it, you shouldn’t be paying to use a platform that puts you in the position of having to do so.

Conclusions

If there’s one general principle to take away from this, it’s just to try to think through and plan your various platforms that need to work together online. When deciding on a new plugin or e-commerce/ticketing platform, try to think long term. Sometimes the cheap and easy immediate option can cost you way more in the long run as it requires wildly extravagant development gymnastics to integrate with the other items you may need running and functioning in concert with the new thing that seemed so simple at the time. Online marketing and e-commerce are always moving forward rapidly, so make sure you cast an eye toward the platforms and services that will allow you to keep up.

Still trying to wrap your head around it all? Whether you’re a tech whiz or new to the game, Search Influence can beef up your analytics approach with qualified confidence. Get an expert opinion and start making smarter e-commerce decisions today.

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January 20, 2020
How Will Safari’s ITP Cookie Policy Updates Impact Google Analytics Tracking?

To browse the Internet in 2019 is to learn how to manage that nagging sense that someone is always watching. You casually look up the ingredients for a traditional eggplant curry while considering lunch options, and weeks later every website you visit is still force-feeding you offers on wholesale quantities of turmeric root. And of course, if you play it right, you can visit a few sites for things you already know you’re going to buy, then wait for the discount offer to populate somewhere else a few days later for a quality bargain.

Well, if you use Safari as your web browser of choice, that last little vaguely dystopian life hack may not serve you particularly well anymore. This is because Apple decided a couple years ago that maybe it isn’t actually all that great for online advertisers to be able to follow you everywhere you go on the internet for extended periods of time, building an intricate consumer profile so that they can shoehorn you promotions for things they know you’ll be powerless not to click on and buy. Specifically, Apple decided to crack down on how Safari manages its users’ cookies, which are the little data containers you have to click an annoying popup to “allow” on the vast majority of websites you visit now.

In 2017, Safari debuted its Intelligent Tracking Prevention protocol (ITP), which was devised to add more rigid restrictions on the degree to which outside parties could track Safari users across the web without those users’ knowledge or consent. Since then, Safari has steadily ramped up its war on trackers as the less scrupulous among advertisers, using already questionable tracking techniques, began developing increasingly shady and manipulative workarounds to continue soaking up that sweet, sweet consumer data. This has all culminated in the release of ITP 2.2 in May of 2019, which now very aggressively and severely limits the kind of tracking options available not only to the more ignominious and exploitative of advertisers, but now also to the well-intentioned businesses and marketers simply trying to quantify and optimize the user experience on the websites they manage. As you might imagine, this has already led to a good bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth in nobler digital marketing circles, as the bad apples have effectively ruined data access and availability for the entire bunch.

But let’s back up a bit. We need to understand a bit about the technical details here before we can understand the ramifications of what Apple/Safari has unleashed upon the marketing world.

What Are Cookies Exactly?

Cookies are ultimately just little chunks of data. When you visit most websites, the site will stash some set of cookie(s) in your web browser. As you continue to use your browser, the cookie essentially reports back to its source about what you’re doing in your browser.

That already sounds a bit scary, given what we know about privacy issues in 2019, but the general use cases that led to the nearly universal use of cookies by websites weren’t really invasive or villainous in intent. Cookies keep track of whether you are logged into a website or not so that no one but you can order the 20-pound box of gummy bears you added to your Amazon cart in a moment of weakness. Likewise, cookies are the mechanism by which Amazon remembers that you added this—and other unspeakable things to your cart—so that you’re confronted with them in the unforgiving light of day the next time you visit their site.

Now, just as a website can use cookies to remember that you logged in and added items to your cart, it can use them to see what else you’re doing on their site. One of the most widely used tools for webmasters and digital marketers is Google Analytics, which is a cookie-driven platform that offers a wealth of invaluable data about how users interact with a website. Importantly, Google Analytics does not provide specific identifying information about who a user is; it simply records the pathways that anonymous users employ to arrive at a website and how they engage with it once they are there. This information is then reported to the administrators of a site’s Google Analytics account, allowing those involved in maintaining and developing a site to assess what is or is not working in terms of marketing strategy and user experience. And at this point in the evolution of the internet, if you or someone in your employ isn’t using some on-site analytics platform to assess user engagement on your website, you probably don’t care enough about your online presence.

Different Types of Cookies

The cookies described in the previous section are referred to as “first-party cookies.” They are classified as such because they are only added by a site that a user has directly visited, and the information collected by the cookie only reports to that site (or an admin thereof) about users’ activity on that site. So while Google Analytics, for instance, is an external platform not built into a website, the only way for it to collect its data is for a site developer to add tracking code directly onto the site to establish the tracking cookie that users will only receive when visiting the site directly. And data is only collected for the Analytics account-holder when the user is on a site with that account’s tracking code.

Meanwhile, out in the spooky online wilderness, there are more exploitative advertisers and marketers who employ what are known as “third-party cookies.” Third-party cookies are still set by a site but are not directly tied to that site. For example, a website serving ads from nefariousadvulture.spam will essentially allow nefariousadvulture.spam to set its own cookie. Since the cookie is tied to nefariousadvulture.spam and not the site the user actually visited, that cookie continues to collect data from the cookied user as he or she moves across any other website serving ads from nefariousadvulture.spam. That allows nefariousadvulture.spam to form fuller profiles of users based on their activity across multiple websites, any of which may be able to transmit actual identifying information to the vulture kings, depending on the nature of the sites being tracked.

Ugh, that was all SO boring. Why did you make me read all that?

I know, and I’m sorry. But a general understanding of cookies and their different types is essential to grasping the significance of what Safari and other browsers are starting to do in the name of user privacy. Here’s a cool dunk to break up the dull tech speak a bit. You deserve it.

So What Does All That Have To Do With Safari’s ITP Protocol?

Initially, with ITP version 1.0, Safari set out to limit the use of third-party cookies. ITP set a 24-hour window for third-party cookies to actively collect data if the user didn’t directly interact with the third-party website that set the cookie. So drawing from the previous third-party cookie example above, if a user directly visited nefariousadvulture.spam within 24 hours of receiving the third-party cookie, it could stay active and continue tracking. If not, the cookie effectively expired after 24 hours. Since the whole premise of this kind of advertising and tracking meant that users were pretty much never going to directly visit the sites serving the ads, this marked a doom and gloom moment for the nefarious ad vulture world. Meanwhile, users of first-party cookies remained generally unaffected. To this point, the general standard was that first-party cookies could remain in place for 30 days before being purged unless a user actively removed them before that point.

But of course, the nefarious ad vultures weren’t just going to give up on a hitherto successful approach to marketing just because one browser got cranky about it. Many advertisers just rolled up their sleeves and figured out how to have partners or clients set their third-party cookies as if they were first-party cookies, which then proceeded to do exactly what they had done all along in terms of tracking users across numerous websites to build consumer profiles. This, as it turns out, was the tipping point where Safari started moving more in the direction of burning the entire house down to kill a spider on the window sill. The updates and increased aggression toward cookies have been steadily and quickly ramping up ever since.

With ITP version 2.0 in 2018, Safari essentially blocked the use of third-party cookies altogether. Shortly thereafter in early 2019, to counteract and preempt the inevitably increased abuse of first-party cookies by nefarious vulture types, ITP version 2.1 reduced the 30-day gestation period for first-party cookies to 7 days. While webmasters and marketers were still reeling and trying to piece together the impact this dramatic change had on their analytics, Safari rolled out ITP version 2.2 in May of 2019 reducing the 7-day first-party cookie expiration to 24 hours. Basically, rather than play whack-a-mole with devious and irresponsible cookie manipulators, Safari just poisoned all the moles along with the grass, dirt, and any other less whack-worthy beings that happened to share their habitat.

What Does This Mean For Webmasters and Marketers?

It means that everyone has to recalibrate a bit with regard to web analytics. As mentioned earlier, Google Analytics is one of the most widely used platforms available to study website user statistics and behavior. And first-party cookies drive it. Until this year, Google Analytics would be able to track user activity on a particular site over 30 days. Now, for Safari users only, it only gets 24 hours.

As an example, imagine that you have an eCommerce business selling novelty hot dog cannons for use at sporting events and other projectile-garbage-food-friendly occasions. Anonymous internet user we’ll call Yuzer reaches that familiar point in life where he or she definitely needs a novelty hot dog cannon (it happens to the best of us). So Yuzer opens up Safari and searches google for “novelty hot dog cannon.” Because your website is well optimized with clearly targeted content, Yuzer quickly finds and clicks on your website from atop the search results. With such well-organized content and such user-friendly layout, Yuzer pretty quickly settles on the fact that this is the place to buy the hot dog cannon of his or her dreams. But this is obviously a big decision, and Yuzer wants to talk over all the cannon options available with his or her significant other before just diving into the hot dog water. So Yuzer bookmarks the page, then leaves to scroll weepily through Craigslist Missed Connections, look up relish recipes, and ultimately binge-watch old Columbo episodes until falling asleep.

To this point, Google Analytics would have reported to you that some anonymous user arrived at your novelty hot dog cannon website via organic search, clicked around a bit to check the specs on various cannon models, then left. You don’t know who the user is, what they like in their relish or how many seasons deep they’ve gotten in Columbo or any other series.

3 days later, Yuzer and his or her partner excitedly plop down together in front of Yuzer’s laptop and return to your website and finally buy the hot dog cannon they know will be the first page in an important new chapter in their lives. They pull up the page Yuzer had bookmarked, complete a purchase, high five, and go out to dinner to celebrate. Everything is great for Yuzer and the enthused dog-loving revelers on the receiving end of Yuzer’s new cannon. But things are now a bit more complicated for you.

Until May of 2019, regardless of browser, you would have seen an accurate representation of a path to purchase. This anonymous user reached your site via Google search, clicked around, left, then came back 3 days later and bought a mid-tier hot dog cannon (a solid starter cannon to be sure, but not exactly all-star material). But since Yuzer uses Safari, now you see that one anonymous user reached your site via Google search, clicked around a bit, and left. Then 3 days later another new and different anonymous user visited your site directly by typing the URL into his or her browser window and immediately bought a product. This isn’t what actually happened, but that’s how it is going to show up in Google Analytics reports.

Tying This All Up, Finally

To this point, Safari is the only major browser enacting these kinds of draconian restrictions on first-party cookies. According to StatCounter, Google Chrome is still the most widely used browser across all devices and platforms by a landslide. But Safari is a very comfortable, if somewhat distant second. And on tablets, Safari is the clear king of the realm, due to the dominance of the iPad within that device market and Apple’s propensity to bully users into Safari at any available opportunity. And while Safari’s move with ITP has already pressured Chrome, Firefox and (to some minor extent) Edge to roll out some of their own privacy and cookie-centered enhancements, they are all far less aggressive toward first-party cookies and ultimately optional, not integrally built into the software.

So the impact of ITP 2.2 may not be immediately earth-shattering in terms of more generalized website statistics, but it’s going to matter on levels no one can fully understand just yet. The problem with data analysis of this sort is that—even if only a relatively small percentage of it is skewed—if it’s skewed in significant ways, you can very easily learn the wrong things from it. If Safari’s cookie restrictions start making it look like you’re suddenly awash in new unique tablet users, when you’re in fact just getting tons of return visits from loyal fans with iPads, you can very easily shift your focus in site enhancements or marketing strategy in the wrong direction. And of course, the whole goal of analytics-based tracking is trying to ensure that you’re focused on the right things for the right reasons.

If there is any consolation in all this, however, it’s that everyone is dealing with the same issue together. Google Analytics and other cookie-driven web platforms will adjust, and many bright minds are already devising alternate methods for preserving more informative portions of responsibly collected user data. And on one hand, the cynic in me personally thinks that a lot of this may come down to sheer corporate sabotage on Apple’s part, since the fact that ITP 2.1 and 2.2 cut directly at the effectiveness of key Google and Facebook tracking platforms in major ways probably isn’t accidental. But if it forces major platforms into finding new ways to track users and websites that are less easily exploited by the nefarious vultures of the world, then maybe we all end up winning in the end.

If you’re concerned about the changes to digital advertising, the experts at Search Influence are here to help. We create regulation-compliant online ads and track their performance as well. Start a conversation today to learn more about how we can help your business grow.

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August 28, 2019