If you're controlling your own web server, the logs will give you plenty of data for analytical purposes without needing to be adding trackers.

In any case, I would put this information prominently on your website.

You can do self-hosted tracking but the real question is what are you going to do with the data.

Honestly except for huge companies the data mostly gets ignored until you redesign your whole site at which point the only data that gets used is trying to figure out how people actually use your site.

If you have a dedicated front end team you can use the data to see if there are patterns (or anti-patterns) you want to optimize for, but beyond that you probably only care about 2 things, what drives people to your site and where they go once they are on your site.

I appreciate your decision. But it depends on the type of business you do. If you are running a utility business like plumbing or carpentry or a service like law, you might not need the trackers. But if your are running some sort of ecommerce shop, and you wish to entice your customers with offers, deal or personalized recommendations then in theory tracking should help.

But as far as I am concerned, I tend to pefer a service that has little to no trackers. There is nothing worse than visiting a page and you have to consent to 1000 trackers. Try with no trackers for a few months then its up to you to decide whether to add the trackers or not.

This is right in my wheelhouse. No, it's not stupid.

The vast majority of web analytics are actually objectively useless. Yes, you will generate a lot of data. No, obsessing over this data is unlikely to lead to making your website better in any way whatsoever.

Thing the first: My personal "business" website (I use this term very loosely) isn't even dynamic. Yes, Flightless Forge is static HTML. I don't even use any Javavscript. The horror!

Thing the second: That's because for my job I manage an online storefront that's completely bespoke (written by: guess who) and part of the above is because I decided I really don't want to bring work home with me. We used to use every stupid analytics platform under the sun and over time, one by one, I wound up turning them all off. This is because they're not only privacy nightmares for our users but also incredibly bloated, and provide all-singing, all dancing dashboards that are veritable avalanches of useless information that management never successfully used to do anything. So I gave up.

The problems with these things is that they make big promises couched in marketing-speak, but there is no actual way to realistically deliver on those results. It's the Night Watchman problem for the digital age.

There is very little actual useful information you can glean from your userbase other than what pages they went to and when. Especially now, mouse cursor heatmaps tell a distorted story because 90% of your users will be on mobile and will have no mouse cursor. Behavior flow indicators will only tell you what you already know, which is that your users insist on using incorrect search terms and don't read. Vanishingly little you can do aside from ensuring that no part of your interface is outright broken will actually increase your conversion rate. You cannot actually determine what your users are thinking unless they tell you, and even then they will lie to you.

So my strategy has instead become to make our website work the way I want it to work on a daily basis, by avoiding the annoyances that annoy me. It must be working, because we have one of the highest rated sites in our industry and our clients go out of their way to compliment us on how much easier to use it is than our competitors.

The number one thing that will drive users away from your site and hurt your conversion rate is anything they perceive as friction in your process, because as soon as they encounter the slightest frustration or adversity or even a simple behavior of your interface that doesn't behave the way they expect it to, they'll click off and go somewhere else. Nirvana is achieved when you realize that a nontrivial fraction of the "friction" your users experienced was in fact them shooting themselves in the foot by being stupid and you can't do anything about this. I log what people put in the search box, for instance, and you would not believe the asinine shit they put in there. Your best practices are therefore not to give the user enough rope to hang himself, and compensate for his stupidity at every opportunity.

(And no, I am not telling you where I work.)

Not the answer to your question, but there are many open source and privacy respecting tracking/analytics services that you can even self-host. Like Rybbit, Shynet, Matomo, Plausible etc.

My entire business is pretty much run by feels. I often get asked why I don't do X, Y, and Z like everyone else, and the answer is usually that I didn't feel like it.

Doesn't hurt the revenue - or maybe it does - I wouldn't know.

There's more than a few FOSS and privacy focused analytics tools it there. Umami is very simple but great: https://github.com/umami-software/umami

There are others as well

There's tracking 😠 and there's "tracking" 🤷

Keeping track of what user behaviours are like in terms of how people interface with your system should be expected. Keeping track of the information on users as they go about their business away from your site or maintaining individualised logs of users behaviour to identify them is the bad stuff. Employing dark patterns to manipulate users is bad.

kinda. Majority of people don't care and those that do will block it. Im fine with telemetry in general and for things I trust im fine allowing it through. It really comes down to selling it to third parties that is the issue. They then hoover it up and combine with all sorts of other data sources and a some central places slices and dices it. It can be anonymized but it just takes a few dots connected and the anonymization is out the window. Just gets worse with llms and stuff being able to poor over data.

love it. you could feature a banner saying "no analytics/tracking". better yet, feature a banner if users don't have an ad blocker:

https://stefanbohacek.com/project/detect-missing-adblocker-wordpress-plugin/

I think it is fair enough to have trackers on your page and I also think it is fair enough that it should remain useable for people that block trackers. Unfortunately a lot of pages are built around third party tracking and are non functional for anybody with integrity filters.

I do the occasional website for local businesses, and I never add any analytics code/trackers. One: they rarely ever ask. And two: the one time someone did ask for it, they never once logged into it or asked for trends. Three: I'd prefer not to unless they demand it.

However, since I'm actually hosting the website for them, I can get decent heat maps from the access logs since they have the IP (which can be roughly geo-located), which URI's are accessed (and those map to pages, and pages map to products/services), how often those are accessed, which page linked them to it or if they came directly to it (by checking the referrer header), which are most accessed (by count of the URI in the logs), and whether they're accessing the site from desktop or mobile (via the user agent header). That can also be combined with any data from their "Contact us" form.

One reason they've probably never asked for it is because I provide a quarterly report for them using that passive data, and they seem happy with it.

Personally, I think not having analytics is great.

As others have said, how this will impact your business will strongly depend on what customers you work with and how you acquire them.

If you heavily depend on customers finding you through that website in the first place, a human/authentic/privacy-respecting site will strongly speak to a minority of potential customers, but might be a competitive disadvantage. All the better when you have a market niche where you could afford this.

Louis has a ranty vlog on this topic (more centered on SEO and content, but I believe similar ideas apply): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc

I did the same thing. Meh.

I have worked with sites that used a lot of tracking products. Usually, the only thing that mattered was the design of the site, and whether there was any friction. I don't think I've ever seen a marketing campaign that successfully used tracking data beyond what you have either way (who bought what product, what product sells how much).

I don't use any tracking beyond looking at normal sever logs for any of my sites.

As much as I appreciate your honesty in this, I only think you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot. Your website is a tool that serves a purpose: to let people find your business and turn them into customers. And in order to know how useful this tool is, you want to have some insights in how much people visit the website, how long they are browsing each page, what pages are read more than others, and so on. Also, you want to know where people come from in your website: do they come from search engines (with what keywords?), or are they clicking through from your social channels? Once you know, you can optimize your marketing materials (including social posts, website content) for your actual target audience.

In stead of not using tracking at all, I would suggest to use anonymized tracking. This gives you enough information to measure effectiveness, without compromising the individual’s privacy. European GDPR requires this, so all tracking tools should have GDPR-compliant options. Also, if you inform your users that you use anonymized tracking, you can show that you’re doing the best you can to protect their privacy as well. Last but not least, (almost) every single site on the World Wide Web tracks their users anyway, so they will likely have been tracked multiple times anyway on their path to your website.

No, nothing wrong with redirecting your users.

The business case of analytics is usually pretty vein and surface level anyways.

That being said:

• investors in your business are going to badger you about metrics if you go that route
• if you do have something to optimize it’s useful
• if you buy ads you might have to add tracking for conversion metrics

Unless your business is niche, then you will be eaten by your competition who does.