Is it possible to track users over a week or month? Often the same user return to our website several times before buying and it's important to learn about this behavior.
no. that's the decision we made in order to be as privacy focused as possible. there's no way to know whether the same person comes back to a site the day after or later. they will always be counted as a new visitor after the first day.
Not sure if privacy is a valid argument here. As long as visitors are annonymised and it is self hosted I don't see how this would invade a person's privacy.
The problem with Google Analytics is not that they track a user on a single domain, the problem is that users are tracked on a *.google.com domain and Google knows who you are based on your other google sessions and knows everything you do on the internet because every website uses GA. With a self hosted product that wouldn't be the case, so the privacy is given by nature even if you'd track a user across a space of a month or longer.
this will limit your solution from many deployments.
Knowing returning visitors from first time visitors is quite important and helps to asssess if viewership, audience and customer base is growing over time.
For startups the "how many unique visitors do you get in a month" may be an important KPI and you're saying your solution cannot answer this question, so another solution will be needed to be deployed.
Unique visitor data's also needed to assess effectiveness of campaigns and run e-commerce operations. There's often campaigns to bring back a user who previously didn't buy (email, ads etc). It's important to measure the effectiveness of these investments separately in web analytics given the campaigns will be different for new and recurring visitors.
markosaric|5 years ago
dustinmoris|5 years ago
The problem with Google Analytics is not that they track a user on a single domain, the problem is that users are tracked on a *.google.com domain and Google knows who you are based on your other google sessions and knows everything you do on the internet because every website uses GA. With a self hosted product that wouldn't be the case, so the privacy is given by nature even if you'd track a user across a space of a month or longer.
propogandist|5 years ago
Knowing returning visitors from first time visitors is quite important and helps to asssess if viewership, audience and customer base is growing over time.
For startups the "how many unique visitors do you get in a month" may be an important KPI and you're saying your solution cannot answer this question, so another solution will be needed to be deployed.
Unique visitor data's also needed to assess effectiveness of campaigns and run e-commerce operations. There's often campaigns to bring back a user who previously didn't buy (email, ads etc). It's important to measure the effectiveness of these investments separately in web analytics given the campaigns will be different for new and recurring visitors.
unknown|5 years ago
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