ad tracking

I stopped participating in ad tracking in 2019 across most of the sites I have control over.

This means that I removed mixpanel and Google Analytics from those sites and to the extent possible stopped sending them data about how users use my sites. If you had of told me a few year ago that I'd stop using Google Analytics, I wouldn't have believed you.

Ads are fucking gross

Don't take this the wrong way if you're in advertising, but you are part of the problem. Ads are gross, generally. They are pay-to-play lazy efforts to get people's attention and get them into your product.

Ads are the slippery slope to so much nefarious and downright hostile aspects of the modern internet. They have been weaponized at scale with the ultra-targeting platforms like Google and Facebook are able to achieve.

The short story is that ads are meant to manipulate and optimize folks into a buying frenzy.

It doesn't stop there though. This tracking technology and harvesting of behaviorial analytics has the potential to manipulate on a much deeper level.

I don't want any part of it.

This doesn't mean that I'm not marketing and I lost my interest in selling stuff.

That's not the case.

I love marketing, and I love writing marketing copy.

It's just the current state of internet advertising that I'm not interested in.

Mixpanel is expensive

Mixpanel is kind of a different beast. It's not like sending Google or Facebook data. It's not about ads, but it's also very expensive for what it is and how much I was using it.

So it got the boot as well.

These days I'm happily using basic analytics via Paul Jarvis's Fathom Analytics. It's simple, anonymous, and inexpensive to use across multiple sites.

It doesn't give me access to complex sales funnels or much else outside of general page views.

So far I like it, and will continue to use Fathom for my ongoing analytics needs.

Even with this simple implementation I wonder if it is useful.

What difference does it make how many people visit my site during a week?

Probably makes no difference at all 😂