Any real business needs to do behavioral tracking for campaign conversions, add-to-cart, customer acquisition, funneling, retention, personalization, etc.
I love how we all hate cookie banners and say they are unnecessary, but are salaries are all paid by apps that do behavioral tracking.
I appreciate the list of reasons to cookies are useful. Despite having worked in technology for 25 years, I couldn't have articulated that list off the top of my head. I have never worked for a website that made money that way.
I think that means not ALL websites need invasive tracking.
Some of those scenarios are dubious as to whether they actually bring profit and "make money". They can very well be a net loss and are merely there to justify the job of the advertising/marketing/analytics/etc team, who is conveniently charge of crunching those numbers and obviously would never put any adverse numbers forward.
Same thing in advertising - there's a lot of middlemen in the industry that are happy to take their cut, cook the numbers and look the other way despite no actual impact on sales.
So while I don't disagree these things can make money when in the right hands and done in moderation, the reality is that there's a shit ton of waste and deadweight in the industry. It may very well be that the actual (vs self-reported) profit from ad/marketing efforts is negative and merely covers the paychecks of said ad/marketing teams.
You asked for the websites that I worked for. I am saying the B2B SaaS sites that I have supported didn't use behavioral tracking. I can't share the exact sites due to NDAs.
You don't seem to understand that one can do behavioral tracking without sharing all personal data with Facebook and Google. GDPR is mainly focused on who you share the data with. Performance tracking of core business processess including traffic sources can be done without involvement of Facebook and Google.
It's totally legit to spend a career helping the folks at Facebook and Google to soak up more private information about everyone so the Trump campaign can improve targeting of the fake news advertisements for the presidential election campaigns. But it is not ethical.
Disagreed. You can absolutely do all analytics, personalization and marketing in-house on your properties. You only need data sharing if you want to influence advertising on other properties or if you display others' ads on yours.
Whether you want to do so is a different matter. This obviously requires (potentially custom) software and infrastructure, vs throwing in GTM and calling it a day. If there is no regulatory reason for it (there isn't - this aspect of the GDPR is not enforced), most businesses won't bother and will take the easy option.
1st party behavior tracking still requires consent. And nearly every business needs third party integrations. I’m still waiting for someone to give me a working example (a real business )
The level of "tech" for a lot of trade and local businesses is often just a mobile phone and word of mouth, no online advertising industrial complex necessary. Those are still very real businesses. When advertising is used it's likely "old school" advertising with no tracking or analytics.
Ironically, if you are looking for a tradesman and do stumble upon an online ad or very polished web presence, be wary as it's basically guaranteed to lead to a boiler room full of scammers who will overcharge you and farm out the actual work to the lowest bidder. Sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam
You are confidently incorrect. Consent is not needed if you only track for your own business and do not send the data to other businesses. One of the big GDPR-compliant website analytics tools, matomo, even has a dedicated page on this topic: https://matomo.org/blog/2021/10/matomo-exempt-from-tracking-...
"Matomo has also been approved by the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) as one of the select few web analytics tools that can be used to collect data without tracking consent."
They need to tell themselves that "data privacy" is a non-issue because otherwise they would have to take responsibility for feeding Facebook/Google all of their users for many years, which directly resulted in fake news laced political advertisements which micro-targeted voters in the presidential elections.
The book "careless people" clearly documents how Facebook engineers were embedded in the Trump campaign to run fake news advertisements micro-targeted to US voters.
It takes a lot of strength to resolve such a fundamental cognitive dissonance, especially if your self image is the talented techie who made money without hurting anyone.
There's no _need_ to use cookies for tracking purposes though, it's usually just easier/cheaper/quicker (or requested by the marketing department) to use off the shelf software than actually spend the time to implement these things.
But if you have a cart, you need a cookie banner regardless of any tracking you are doing.
Even the biggest tech companies, with surplus engineering resources, do third party integrations.
"easier / cheaper / quicker" means that will be the solution . You can't tell your boss "let's spend more money, more time, more risk" on getting it done.
It's not that uncommon. It's a completely reliable solution to the problem of attributing sales and knowing how much each advertising channel generate individually in sales.
But taking into account that almost all jobs in advertising depend on keeping it "a mystery", it's no surprise that relatively few companies do it.
After all, it looks better if you tell your boss or your customer that they had 40 000 "impressions" thanks to your campaign, rather than 400 definite sales.
It's a shame this is downvoted. It doesn't make it right, but it is true.
Until the regulation actually gets enforced so that everyone is on a level playing field and does not do such things, you will be at a disadvantage if you're the only one to comply, so the winning strategy is to not comply and engage in such practices just like your competitors do.
> you will be at a disadvantage if you're the only one to comply, so the winning strategy is to not comply
"need" is the wrong word for this. And the comment doesn't talk about it as a prisoner's dilemma, it says "need" unconditionally. The downvotes are not sad.
Any real business needs to do behavioral tracking for campaign conversions, add-to-cart, customer acquisition, funneling, retention, personalization, etc.
I love how we all hate cookie banners and say they are unnecessary, but are salaries are all paid by apps that do behavioral tracking.
Only hobby blogs can get by without it.