I don't. I believe marketers should have exactly zero ways to measure the effectiveness of their mind hacking efforts. Any data they try and collect should have negative value by virtue of being completely randomized by the browser.
Actually I believe marketers shouldn't even exist. Nothing they say is trustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The internet would be much better off without these constant attempts to subvert it for their purposes.
Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible. That is possible because people tested countless times what works, what didn't, what is the most efficient path to a rewarding UX, and so on.
Yes, there are a ton of garbage lazy marketers in the world. Saying that marketing shouldn't exist would immediately render every refined UX you have navigated, purchased from, and or loyally stream content from.
Throwing out the good because of the bad is too far of a reach IMO. Anywho, that's just little old me and my opinion doesn't mean much.
Just accruing swaths of data doesn’t help, you need to interpret it correctly. I think qualitative data will bring you a long way. Once you need to do A/B testing, you can also do it privacy friendly.
If you market your product and run a campaign? Why not offer discount codes or something to figure out how you got them.
Tracking what button or page layout works better from a conversion perspective is not a privacy issue. It's a user experience benefit.
Having a SaaS business and not understanding the exact user funnel, conversion, abandonment, etc. will directly translate into a loss of your job and/or the failure of your business.
This isn't about personal preference which you have every right to. This is about building a business, which is why we're all here, and understanding how to successfully delight our customers.
Funny; those kinds of sites are my least favorite. All those colors and buttons are an information overload, and the animations make my laptop fans spin like crazy. Not everyone bought their computer under a decade ago.
Please, blue links and black text aren't evil. We need to make interfaces functional and stop rather than continuously A/B test them to maximize addictiveness ("engagement").
"Think of your favorite site with the best experience possible."
Regardless of the site experience that you prefer, I can assure you that thought, testing, and iterations have occurred to deliver the experience that you personally prefer.
Furthermore, I don't want hyper-optimized experiences. These experienced tend to be addictive, whether intended or not. Using an interface shouldn't feel "magical", it should work. I know that you weren't implying addictiveness or engagement, yet these values are (consciously or unconsciously) prevalent enough in the field that they've lowered my level of trust in analytics-driven iteration. Other responses in this thread should also show that I'm far from the only one who feels this way. Earning back broken trust in these situations typically requires going above and beyond past expectations.
User research is research, and should require informed consent held to the same standards of consent as actual research. In any human research, participation should be opt-in. Participants should be given complete information about analytics and how they will be used (with the option to see source code), own their data, be able to revoke their data, and see conclusions of the studies in a format they can understand. Any questions they have should be responded to before and after they opt-in. This shouldn't be buried in a confusing privacy policy but provided upfront, in a language they can speak. People frequently learn interfaces in languages that are foreign to them, but reading details of user research is a different story: you might need a translator. Otherwise, your sample will be even more heavily biased.
This is a lot of work, and might make analytics more trouble than they're worth.
Nothing they say is trustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest
Everyone who says anything has that same conflict of interest. You do, I do, marketers do, salespeople do, engineers do, politicians do, scientists do. Completely dismissing value of an entire profession based upon self interest doesn't have a limiting principle.
Marketing, even if you naively limit the term to just cover advertising, is a rich and useful function of capitalism and society in general. The key to dealing with it is in protecting basic freedoms like a right to privacy.
I do because in 99% of cases it's a deliberate waste of my time and attention.
> Everyone who says anything has that same conflict of interest.
I don't think so. The information I receive from friends and peers is far more trustworthy. With marketing, I get selective truths at best.
Lots and lots of people on this site admit to adding "reddit" to their searches when looking for product reviews. Why? Because they don't trust marketers. We want real information from real people with real experiences, not some paid-for narrative. We especially want to know the risks, the negatives and the cons, precisely the kind of information marketers want to bury.
Since ads need to be conspecious by law, I don't see a conflict of interest. We know this is a carefully crafted story of the person who has stakes in the product or service.
(I've noticed that TikTok does this explicitly, providing a different short URL for each share request - it's clean, which makes them easier to share without blocking out a whole chat, but still not wanted)
It's not that I don't mind the parameters, it's that I also mind the URL tracking. And I can do something directly about the URL tracking.
https://aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html?spm=a2g01.126...
vs
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html
Both take you to the same page.
URLs, especially when clicked from ads tend to have a HUGE amount of extra crap that's in no way needed for any kind of functionality.
The first link is:
https://aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html?spm=a2g01.12617084.fdpcl001.8.2665mpnYmpnYMH&gps-id=5547572&scm=1007.19201.130907.0&scm_id=1007.19201.130907.0&scm-url=1007.19201.130907.0&pvid=65430901-7ec6-4584-a620-4618974e03ae
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000336900709.html
It's not fun to get a 2048 character long URL to a product linked to me on mobile, where it literally doesn't fit on the screen all at once. =)
Facebook can use it to link contacts together. I get a share link, it gives it an ID, I send it to someone, they open it and now they have linked my account with their account. Same works if I click on a page and get the ID, share just that page, and someone clicks it (and there's some fb element on the page).
Now if several users a day share a link here on HN, facebook will know about us as belonging to a certain group.
This is different than the type of tracking you're talking about. ID-type parameters like gclid, dclid, and fbclid are all unique to the ad impression, and tied to the individual that ad was served to. Which means they can tie it back to other data sources they have about the individual. Like social graph data for Facebook, or demographic or interests data for other advertiser networks.
Personally I care about ID parameters a lot, and UTM-type parameters not at all. But that's just me.
They are fundamentally first-party analytics - they show up in the server logs of the site visited, and that site needed to craft the link in order to place the parameters in the first place. There's a big difference between URL parameters and e.g. cookies attached to third-party javascript.
I definitely support the freedom of people to remove these URL parameters if they want. But it's not fair to classify them as a "war" - they are a tool used by scrupulous marketers, too.
Even if there are scrupulous entities, the harm caused by the unscrupulous ones overshadows them.
In the case of some large sites that provide pervasive services like FB, Twitter, and Google, you interact with their sites incidentally as you surf in the internet. It's these sites that are a potential privacy risk IMO.
And on and on it goes.
If you think about it... what's the problem with a URL tracking which advertiser you came from? Why would you insist that it be a secret which ad you clicked to come to a site?
This tool is removing URL parameters some of which are absolutely harmless and not violating anyone's "privacy". We really need to draw the line somewhere and decide what the heck means "privacy" at this point, because everything can be interpreted as violation of privacy.
Likewise, are those site owners allowed to exist, or should they just offer content at a loss, and pay millions of ads, and have no even clue which ads worked and which didn't? And when there's a paywall of course everyone is SUPER ANNOYED by the paywall.
So to recap, the public wants absolutely everything, for free, and they want to disrupt as much as possible from the site's mechanism to understand what the other side of this communication is and what they want.
Good.
> what's the problem with a URL tracking which advertiser you came from?
It's additional bits of information used to identify me.
> We really need to draw the line somewhere and decide what the heck means "privacy" at this point, because everything can be interpreted as violation of privacy.
Okay. If I explicitly give you information and you use it for my benefit alone, it's not a violation of privacy. Everything else is.
Concrete example: people provide their addresses to companies so they can have packages delivered. This is obviously legitimate. Selling my address to marketers so they can spam my inbox with unwanted ads is obviously unacceptable.
Placing identifying information in URLs is unacceptable simply because I didn't explicitly choose to reveal that information. I don't even care if it's harmless, the sheer audacity of these people is offensive.
> This tool is removing URL parameters some of which are absolutely harmless and not violating anyone's "privacy".
Yeah, I'm not risking it. They'll probably find a way to abuse this information if they haven't already. Marketers are not supposed to get any data whatsoever. I'm increasingly convinced marketing shouldn't even exist to begin with.
> should they just offer content at a loss, and pay millions of ads, and have no even clue which ads worked and which didn't?
Don't pay for ads in the first place.
> And when there's a paywall of course everyone is SUPER ANNOYED by the paywall.
That's okay.
> the public wants absolutely everything, for free, and they want to disrupt as much as possible from the site's mechanism to understand what the other side of this communication is and what they want.
I guess. Just return 402 Payment Required if people are expected to pay. We refuse to be the product.
Is the information you collect unusable for directly or indirectly identifying an individual? Go wild! :)
Good riddance. Affiliate schemes just encourage people to spam low quality content full of affiliate links to products that are rarely good.
And once the adtech companies notice that every tag except utm is being stripped, you can bet that utms will start being stuffed with tracking.
(and then the tracking economy, let’s say China for example, will just steamroll our economies. This is what I‘m worried about, in a vacuum a slower developing but ad/tracking-free society would be preferable of course.)
Of course I despise all ads as much as the next hacker here on HN, I just wonder sometimes if they‘re a necessary evil.
So in the end I‘m inclined to agree with your nuanced „some general statistical gathering is OK, just no fingerprinting etc“.
Such an economy is still very possible: just pay people for their data. Giving it away isn't economically efficient and imposes significant negative externalities, as we've seen.
Oh well. Just let the economy perform slightly worse then.
> for knowledge means better resource allocation
Who cares about some corporation's resource allocation? That's their problem to solve. We should be caring about all the people whose privacy they are violating instead.
If they want to allocate resources efficiently, they should be required to do it in a way that doesn't invade anyone's privacy. If that means they'll make less money so be it.