We've removed Google Analytics from our eCommerce website

Nader K. Rad, 2021-07-31

After a year of planning and hesitating, we've finally removed Google Analytics from our eCommerce website, Management Plaza:

https://mplaza.training

We never tracked users in weird ways, and Google Analytics was the only unclean element on our website, mainly used to check our overall traffic, referrals, etc. However, that still shares user data with Google, which is not pleasant. I know that people who care about these things block Google Analytics on their browsers, but it's great to expand it to more people.

On the other hand, we had one of those annoying cookie banners like most websites. Like most websites, our cookie banner was simply wrong. What GDPR expects is not to annoy people with a banner that has a simple "accept" button and another that opens a complicated page with a reject button hidden somewhere on it. The reject choice on the banner must be simple and accessible, like the accept button.

Now, if you provide options like that (and you must), almost no one accepts the tracking cookies. I once read an article from someone who had tried a correct cookie banner and reported that only 7% of users (if I remember correctly) accepted it. Even those are probably people who have made a mistake when clicking. So, in practice, you can't have cookie-based tracking and be GDPR compliant.

Besides that, the Google Analytics data becomes less and less reliable. Based on what I've seen on our website, Google Analytics only sees about 55% of our users. It wouldn't be a problem if the remaining 45% were random, but they are not. People who use a browser or a browser plugin that blocks Google Analytics are just not like those who don't, and therefore, that 55% sample is not representative.

So, we've removed Google Analytics, and we're happy about it. To have information about our traffic, referrals, and so on, we've installed Matomo on our own server. It's really good!

https://matomo.org/

There are two ways of gathering data in Matomo; one uses Javascript, which is more or less like Google Analytics, and the other uses server access logs. We're using the latter. A cron job runs once a day and loads the new server access logs into Matomo and runs a Matomo command to process them.