I’ve been told that I do by a credible, educated source. But it’s just a photography website. I’ve never seen cookie type warnings on an artist website before. So I thought I would get opinions from more people whether I need to have a popup window that viewers have to click to accept just because I’m using google analytics.
It’s going to be an eyesore and I’m worried will potentially turn people off because it’s weird for a simple artist website to have such a popup.
If I’m technically supposed to, what are the risks of not doing it?
You need consent from your visitors if you are using analytics. The data google collects in your name is neither stored and processed on your server nor kept away from other data google collects. Question is if you can just use the statistics from your hosting service instead and not using google analytics.
Thanks! That’s the same thing I was told before. Interesting about getting analytics from my hosting company. Google analytics glass gotten absurdly complicated in the last decade. Seems it’s designed exclusively for huge commercial websites. I just want to know how many visitors and page views and behavior on site like how many people clicked a certain link. That’s all it used to be.
Is there a simpler alternative that doesn’t require consent?
What I usually do for my sites is to add them to Google Search Console (https://search.google.com/). This helps SEO and you get some basic idea of the amount of visitors your site gets. But again, it’s basic.
The need for a GDPR style ”popup” warning is dependent on your location.
In the US, there is no need for any popup warnings. Even in California, if you meet the California residents requirements of CCPA:
Have $25M+ in annual gross revenue or
Have 50%+ of annual revenue from data sales or
Have bought, sold, and/or shared personally identifiable info (PII) on 50K+ California residents.
Unlike GDPR, CCPA is an opt-out law; Not opt-in, so no Popup is required.
If you are in Brazil then you need to look at LGPD, Brazil’s privacy law.
Thailand has its own PDPA laws.
That being said, I’m not saying using Google Analytics is a good thing. Google doesn’t do anything for free. They don’t ”charge” you money but instead collect private information on your customers.
If someone gets to your site from any place other than a Google search, Google doesn’t have any way to know about it unless you provide them that with something like having Analtics installed.
Even if someone uses Google search to find your website, Google has no way to know what your customers do once they get to where ever page of yours they landed on. They can’t tell how long they are on your site, what pages of yours they browsed, or what links on your site they followed.
Google doesn’t offer analytics to help you with your site; they offer this service so they can invade your customer’s privacy.
The unfortunate part of this is that most people who install Analytics don’t even hardly use it.
They both seem about equal. Unfortunately they both cost money. Plausible would probably be 7$/month for my site and Simple Analytics would be 10$/month. That’s kind of a lot considering I’m not selling anything and analytics is more of a curiosity and a way of improving my site and addressing problems.
Are there any free analytics that are similar to these two?
If not does anyone have a preference between the two or a better recommendation?
If you are a little bit ”techy” and you think you can follow some straight forward installation instructions(like setting up a MySQL database), then have a look at Matomo On-Premise. It’s open-source and free to use on your own server and doesn’t share data with anyone.
It depends on what you want to track. Doesn’t your hosting company have some basic tracking data?