#156 – Derek Ashauer on Analytics Options and Privacy Challenges

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, analytics options and privacy challenges for WordPress site owners.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Derek Ashauer.

Having spent over 15 years in the WordPress arena, Derek has transitioned from building client sites to creating specialized WordPress plugins. Today we get to hear about his journey creating Conversion Bridge, a tools specifically designed to streamline the process of implementing analytics platforms and conversion tracking on WordPress websites.

We start with an overview of analytics, tracing its evolution from the simple server logs of the early internet days, to the sophisticated data gathering mechanisms provided by Google Analytics and others.

We explore how the introduction of European privacy laws has significantly impacted the data landscape, challenging marketers and businesses to adapt to a new era where data privacy is regarded differently in different locales.

Derek offers his perspectives on this rapidly changing field, discussing the rise of modern privacy focused analytics platforms like Fathom, Plausible and others. He explains how these technologies employ cookieless tracking techniques to respect user privacy, while still providing valuable insights for website owners.

We also address the problem of data accessibility and user privacy. Derek, sharing his personal views as a marketer, acknowledges the complexity of balancing effective marketing strategies with ethical data use. He explains his thoughts on why modern solutions might strike a better balance, ensuring that user data remains private, while allowing businesses to glean just the insights they need.

Whether you are managing a WooCommerce store, or building sites for clients, Derek’s insights into conversion tracking will be of interest. He talks about some of the hurdles site builders face with traditional systems and how Conversion Bridge simplifies conversion tracking across various platforms and plugins without the need for extensive coding.

If you’re an agency, developer, or digital marketer, this discussion will help equip you with the knowledge and strategies to navigate the ever evolving landscape of web analytics.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Derek Ashauer.

I am joined on the podcast by Derek Ashauer. How you doing, Derek?

[00:03:40] Derek Ashauer: I am doing well, thank you so much.

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much for joining me. We’ve had various chats over the years, but this is going to be a chat that we’ve never had before. This is going to be all about analytics.

We’ll talk about all of the different bits and pieces, perhaps get into the future of analytics, the past of analytics, who knows? But stay with us, dear listener. It’s going to be a really interesting conversation. I feel like things are at a bit of an inflection point, and people definitely have strong opinions on this, and I think that can often lie on geographical grounds, where you live in the world and things like that.

So before we get into that conversation, Derek, do you just want to give us a little potted bio? Tell us who you are.

[00:04:15] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, my name’s Derek Ashauer, I’m in Colorado US. I’ve been in the WordPress community for, well, I guess I’ve been working with WordPress for about 15 years, I think. Doing client sites and things like that. So I’ve done the independent freelancer agency, but now I’ve moved to making WordPress plugins. So I have one for photographers called Sunshine Photo Cart.

But my big one that I’m working on lately is called Conversion Bridge, which really makes it easy to add analytics platforms to your WordPress website, and also make it really easy to do conversion tracking, which is something that a lot of agencies and people are building sites for clients just neglect to do. And one reason why is because it’s kind of a pain in the butt.

So the goal is to make it a lot easier so that I can do it for myself, and my client sites that I’ve worked on, but also then to make it easier for everyone else. So that’s how I got the idea for that.

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: Prior to hitting the record button, Derek and I were saying that, you are on a journey with this, you know, you’re not putting yourself up here as the definitive authority. I think you were basically saying that a little while ago your knowledge was not that deep in this arena and you’ve really had to educate yourself. And I think it’s fair to say that you were trying to summarise it as you’re still learning.

So let’s have a conversation about this and see where we end up. The thought occurs to me that if we were to go back, oh gosh, I mean the internet, every time I say this sentence the internet does obviously get a little bit older, but let’s go for 20 years, something like that. I feel that if you went to a website, there wasn’t even the thought that there was any kind of analytics. Maybe there was some server log somewhere that was recording that, okay, we served up a page, but that was about it.

And then at some point analytics software came along and very quickly started to leverage all of the existing technologies and became really, really sophisticated ever so quickly. You would copy and paste a code, and it was typically Google, I think that dominated the arena right from the outset. They offered a free service, Google Analytics. You could copy and paste one line of code. There was no barrier to entry to that technology. And it would give you all sorts of fascinating information really quickly.

I think everybody was happy with that status quo, but in the more recent past, let’s say decade or so, but definitely it seems to be ramping up at the moment. There seems to be concerns about who gets the data, why is this data necessary? Is this data consumable by, I don’t know, an American company looking at a European who’s browsing on a particular website and things like that?

With all of this, just give us your overarching opinion on it, and then we can go from there. What’s the state of play at the moment with analytics? Where are we? The year 2025 at the moment. Do you have any sort of overarching insight into where analytics, in air quotes, is at the moment?

[00:06:55] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, it’s a lot harder because of the European privacy laws for the analytics platforms to get the data that marketers and other people have been used to for a long time. Where people came from, you used to be able to get like exactly what search terms people were looking at and landed on your site and what they did. You know, if someone searched Fort Collins landscaper, local landscape company could see that that’s exactly what they searched, and then what that user did on their website from that search term. And that’s just kind of gone. That deep level of data is unfortunately not possible anymore to follow those type of European laws, and privacy restrictions and things like that. So there’s a lot of people who are struggling to get the data that they were used to. That’s kind of the short of it, I guess.

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think that we kind of let the horse escape from the barn a little bit, and we’re now just trying to get the horse back into the barn and get it under control again? And what I mean by that is, do you think that these technologies, the analytics and what have you, do you think it kind of just crept up upon us? There was this slow but inexorable extension of what analytics software could do. And all the while it felt like completely benign, you know, there’s no problem with it. How could anybody possibly make use of this in a way which might be harmful or, I don’t know, intrusive or what have you?

So the software became more and more clever. But then I think people, especially like you said on the European side of things, started to take a look at it and thought, hmm, it’s interesting, a lot of this data is going to, in many cases, big North American companies. Google, I suppose would be a perfect example, but you’ve obviously got other things like Facebook and what have you.

Just try to maybe restore something a bit more where the user is in control, as opposed to these giant corporations being in control. So just trying to bring it back to the starting line, if you like, to the moment before the horse got out so that we can reestablish some rules.

So, I don’t know. It sounds from what you were saying as if you’re kind of regretful that the analytics solutions can’t do what they once could. I suppose the European argument would be, well, that’s because it never really, with hindsight, we should never have let it get that far in the first place. What’s your thoughts on that?

[00:09:07] Derek Ashauer: I mean, I kind of see it. The way I often describe a lot of things is like a pendulum swing. In the beginning it went really far in one direction, we got all kinds of data, and then the laws popped up and now it feels like, we can’t get nearly enough data for advanced marketing, for large corporations that are really doing massive campaigns.

And then there’s the alternatives, Fathom, Plausible, Pirsch, you know, lots of great, Usermaven. There’s a lot of new alternative analytics platforms now that are out there, and now finding clever ways to claw back some of that.

It’s never going to be nearly as detailed as it was a decade ago, that was kind of like the heyday of marketing where you could get so much great data on stuff. But you know, so we had too much maybe in some people’s opinions, and then maybe there’s a bit of not enough, and now those companies are finding some ways to move maybe towards a middle ground of what works for everyone.

And as an American, I’m like, yeah, whatever. You saw that I visited these several websites in a row, I really don’t care. That never really bothered me, I haven’t understood the massive problem with it.

Going through all this, I have learned, you know, maybe there’s a few spots where it would be good to protect that and maybe they don’t know that but, yeah, I’m the person that does accept all on every single website that I got to as a marketer, because I’m just like, yeah, great, I’ll give this website some data on me, I don’t mind.

[00:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve got a very open mind to all of that, haven’t you? And obviously, you are digging into this and your business is kind of largely tied up to that, so very understandable position to have.

You mentioned there several platforms, and you rattled them off one after another, Fathom and others. So a lot of these will be unfamiliar, I think, to this audience. What is the proposition?

So it sounds like many of them are quite new. What is it that they bring to the table, and are these SaaS based products, or are in some cases a WordPress plugin? Or something that can install on your own hardware? What’s going on there? Just rattle off those names again and maybe just give us the low down on what they do, and how they’re getting into the market, and competing against giants like Google.

[00:11:01] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so there’s definitely some great new options and a lot of the initial ones were SaaS based. So there’s ones, like I said, Plausible, Fathom, Usermaven, Pirsch is another great one that I really enjoy. My plugin Conversion Bridging integrates with like 12 different analytics platforms, so there’s tons of them, and there’s still many more that I have on my list to do. So there’s lots of alternatives, which there weren’t any before, until Google Analytics 4 kind of came out and people were like, we don’t like GA4, and that opened the door for a lot of platforms.

But to get back to your question, yeah, one of the differences that they offer is they do what’s called cookieless tracking. So that’s one of the big things that the privacy laws in Europe were like, it was around cookies and tracking the cross websites. So that the user, they go to landscaper website, then they go, no, I’m going to go to Home Depot and I’m going to look for my own lawnmower, and now I’m going to price check against Lowe’s and all these different things. And Google Analytics could see where they were going, and all these different places. Or Facebook ads could track all these different websites that they went to and gauge this type of person and who they are and what they’re shopping for and things like that. So trying to crack down on that.

Well, these alternative platforms do it without cookies. They have a way, a method, without getting too technical of just basically fingerprinting the user, and know for that one session when they’re on your website, what they’re doing. But then it stops there. It doesn’t go to all the other websites and give your entire four hours you were online, and all the different websites that you’re browsing to a company to let them know what you’re doing everywhere.

So that’s kind of their main offering. And they are SaaS, you know, they’re just like Google Analytics, but they do cost. So that’s, they can be affordable. They’re anywhere, I think there’s some that are like $6, $7 a month for what a basic blog would ever need, up to $50 to, or even $100 a month depending on the amount of traffic, which is hard to reconcile for a lot of people who were used to free Google Analytics.

So it’s hard to make that leap when you’re going, wait, I could do Google Analytics for free and there’s some countries, and even like a state or two in the US that have some laws where it’s like, erm, what’s the setup involved in that? There might be law violations, simply by using Google Analytics you could be violating some of those things in a couple countries.

But there are some setups you can do to try and make it work with European privacy laws and stuff. Takes some extra work. But it’s a challenge. Is it worth it? We’ve been so used to, for 20 years, for having free analytics to then now suddenly switch and pay for analytics can be hard for some site owners.

Or as if you’re an agency doing that to convince your client’s like, well, we should actually start paying for this. And because you get 200,000 visits a month, it’s going to cost you $100 a month. They go, or I could use the free version. Yeah, well, I’ll just stick to the free version. So it is, it’s a hard conversation to have. When is it worthwhile? It just really depends on, I mean, you’ve got to really try it out.

[00:13:44] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose no matter how wonderful the staff at Google are, they’re not in the business of losing money. And so I’m guessing that at some point the pendulum does swing in Google’s favor. So what might be free at the point of use, so in other words, you download a snippet from Google, and you put it into the back end of your website, or you pay, let’s say $20 a month, or $50 a month, or whatever. I’m guessing that Google are doing quite well, let’s say, in terms of the data that they gather, and the way that they can use that themselves. Or, I don’t know if they sell that data onto any other brokers or what have you. But presumably there’s that concern.

Just going back to what you said about these other, and I’m going to use modern platforms, let’s go for that, the ones that you mentioned. You said fingerprinting, and I’ve heard this phrase before, and I have the merest idea of what that means. So Google Analytics traditionally came about with a cookie, and we get what that is. But what are the ways around that, that fingerprinting, well, essentially, what is fingerprinting? What are some examples of how that works?

[00:14:40] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, it’s a term that I just use in this moment. It’s not necessarily a term that you’ll see as you go around, it’s just the word that came out. But it’s just a way to uniquely identify somebody through various different points. You check these five different things about a person, and because of exactly what they are, those five elements, then we can say, that’s this person. So that’s kind of, each platform, I call them alternative platforms, you said modern platforms, they have their slightly different way of doing it, but they have their way of identifying without using cookies.

So the traditional way is like Google Analytics, you set a cookie, random value in the browser, and then every time they go to a new page, you just check for that cookie and that value. That’s how we know they are, because that’s how we know who they are. Again, the modern platforms are doing it every time the page loads, it’s saying, who is this again? Let’s check these five points. I think sometimes it’s browser, it’s various different elements that they’ll check to then determine who that person is, and then know who you are as you go down the path on the website, but it’s not setting cookies to do that.

[00:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: So what kind of information might it be? I mean, I can imagine an obvious one would be things like, okay, what browser are you using, for example? That might be one indicator, and then if you match that with another indicator, and then a third one, and a fourth one, over four or five different indicators, you are going to be, well, what are the chances that that’s a different person?

[00:15:58] Derek Ashauer: General location, stuff like that, yeah. Using this specific browser, this version of their browser. In my stuff, I haven’t fully identified what those platforms are actually using. I’ve just kind of, at this point left it. They do cookieless tracking, they have a way of doing it, okay great.

Some are better than others. To be honest, there are, Fathom has improved this. I know it was a struggle when I started Conversion Bridge about a year ago. For example, when someone landed on your page and then they did a conversion, say they fill out a form or made a purchase 10 pages later, those two weren’t associated with, because it was just one page view at a time, wholly independent things. They couldn’t tell that you are that person on that page view, and that person on that page view. I actually did this, I think last week just to check in on them, and it actually did finally say, okay, yeah, that was the same person. That came in and did that. So yeah, they’re finding ways to make it work and better identify those across one website.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, is the promise of these platforms though that they are different, or are they trying without cookies to get back to the point where cookies were? In other words, a cookie, until it was cleared out, could literally follow you everywhere. You know, it would know which website you’d been to, and could last for a long, long time and all of those concerns.

Is the intention of these other analytics platforms to sort of step away from that and say, okay, we’re going to track you on this one domain. So if you’ve got example.com as your domain, and it’s an e-commerce store, whilst you’re there, our platform will keep an eye on you, and we’ll learn if you have gone through a bunch of pages, and whether you’ve converted and bought a thing or not. But once you step away from that domain, that’s it, we are done with you.

Or do you get the intention that they are somehow just, humans always figure out a way, right? If we give them enough time, they’ll figure out a way. Is the intention for these other platforms, do you perceive that they would like to get to the point where cookies were?

[00:17:45] Derek Ashauer: No. They’re number one selling point, I think if you went to the homepage of every single one of them is they do privacy first analytics, is like the banner thing. That’s what they’re offering. And that’s why it’s so much bigger in Europe than it is here in the US and North America and stuff like that.

But, yeah, that’s their main thing, their privacy focused analytics. Google Analytics alternatives that are privacy focused is their main draw. I think someone reminded me of, Katie Keith from Barn2, she reminded me of the story from Fathom. They specifically sent Google Analytics a cake to thank them for being so bad at what they do that they allowed them to create a whole industry as an alternative to them. Stuff like that. So, I think they’re trying to do the privacy focused stuff, and then backfill in the features to give people as much data as they possibly can that they were used to in Google Analytics.

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: You said earlier, and we’ll just touch on this briefly, you said earlier that, the implication of what you said, and you may not have meant this, but I’ll say it as if you are saying it, and then you can criticise whatever I say. It sounds like, if you could rewind the clock and get rid of the European legislation and what have you, you would do that, and you’d be happy with that position. You are okay with being tracked and all bets are off. So firstly, let’s address that. Would you be okay with all of that?

[00:19:03] Derek Ashauer: I think there’s got to be a balance between the two. I get that there’s, you know, for me it’s a thing. I don’t care if you know all the different things of where I went. You know, you see those futuristic movies where it’s individualised ads on video screens, and I’m like, that’s actually kind of cool. It helps give me gift ideas for my wife, stuff like that, because I’m a terrible gift giver. So, yeah, recommend me some products. I wouldn’t have thought to do that. I’ve bought things off of ads I’ve seen on Facebook or Twitter, things like that. Because I was like, that was a great gift for my dad. I never would’ve purposely found that if I hadn’t been shown that ad because for whatever reason, so I’m not against that personally.

[00:19:37] Nathan Wrigley: My guess though is that it’s not really that that’s the problem in most people’s minds. It’s like, who’s holding that data, and where does that data get moved to? Just the idea that, as an example, there might be a data broker firm who may purchase that data. And in some cases, let’s imagine that you ended up on a website which you regret going to. You can read into that, dear listener, whatever you like. But you end up somewhere and all of a sudden connections are made between you as a person. And you can also imagine scenarios in which, I don’t know, data gets linked from various data brokers and they start to create an impression of who you are.

I can imagine scenarios where that could get out of hand, and potentially come back to bite you as an individual. So I suppose there’s a little bit of that muddled up in it. It’s not that the business, the WooCommerce store or whatever, is going to have any nefarious reason to have that data. Or wish to know where you’ve come from, where you’re going to, what ad you might have clicked on, what were the previous page that you came from, and so on and so forth.

It’s more that there just seems to be this fairly bizarre industry of data brokers who managed to get their hands on this data, and at that moment, you don’t know what’s going to happen with it. And we’ve all made mistakes in life, but we can erase them just with the passage of time. But with the advent of the internet, some of those mistakes might stick with us for a long time. Does that make any sense?

[00:21:04] Derek Ashauer: No, it makes sense. I mean, I could see how someone would visit, again, visit the landscaper website, and all of a sudden they did not know that the fact that they went to a landscaper website was sent to Meta. They’re like, well, I didn’t know that was, I was going to a landscaper website. Why does Meta need to know that I was checking out who was going to cut my grass?

I get that in some regards, that there’s just not a knowledge of where things are going. I think it’s a pretty safe thing to say that cookie popups, that was just not the right way to go about it. That’s just made things, made the internet significantly worse. What are the solutions to give website owners the data they need to make good marketing decisions?

Because otherwise, I mean, I think of it even on a bigger macro level that that landscaper, if they don’t know any of the ads are working or what’s going on or what people are doing, then they don’t know what ads, where to spend their money that works best. Now they have to increase their costs to cover the blanket marketing that they have to do because they don’t know exactly what attribution, what marketing channel is actually working for them. So to pay for the 50 different marketing channels they have to do, they have to increase the cost for everybody.

So if they were able to narrow it down and say, well, we know that mailers and these Google ads are actually our best ways to make money, we don’t need to spend on email newsletter, or all these different things, our marketing spends only 5% of what it would be otherwise, that means we don’t have to charge as much.

So it goes to bigger macro level discussions of economics of, in some ways for the consumer, it could be better for these companies to have some data about you.

But I understand what you’re saying though. It is like, again, I don’t want Meta to have it, I want the landscaper company to have it. That’s okay. And that’s the line that I think a lot of people, I think would agree that, yeah, I don’t want Meta to have that data but, yeah, I’m okay with my local landscaper having the data so they knew what ads worked and things like that.

And those privacy or the modern analytics platforms do at least get you a good amount of that data. So they are some good alternatives to that. But it’s not going to get you, those mega corporations are not going to get the, okay, well they clicked on our ad, they went to these other places, then came back to our site, and then did this and they came back to site, and then did this and came back to our site. And to get those really deep analytics. They’re not going to and that’s the challenge. But I would say, the WordPress space, that’s 90% of people are going to do fantastic with modern analytics platforms and get the data that they need.

[00:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting because you are owning the domain, you’re running the domain, you probably don’t have any interest in brokering the data out to Facebook anyway. So what you can get out of that is probably useful. We’ll dig into that in a moment.

I’m just curious, being a resident in the USA, and I’m obviously, you can tell by my accent, I’m based in the UK, we may have, and I don’t know if we do, we may have a very different experience of browsing the internet.

I, for my part, if I was to open up a brand new browser, clean out everything that’s ever happened in that browser and start again, and browse around a whole variety of websites, I am inundated with cookie banners. Go to any large property, I am going to see cookie banners a lot, a very significant amount of the time because that’s how it goes over here.

They can be confusing. They can be deliberately confusing. And in some cases they can be eye wateringly difficult to understand. The language is inverted so that you are kind of clicking on something you didn’t intend to click on. There can be so many options. I mean, it is really remarkable how many options there can be. You open up this little popup and you scroll, and you scroll, and you scroll, and you scroll, and you could do that whole scroll thing for like a whole minute and you still haven’t run out of options. And so we are living through this, and I don’t know if it’s the same where you are, I don’t know if you encounter any of this stuff.

[00:24:51] Derek Ashauer: I definitely see them, but it’s not on every single website because those cookie banners can be configured so that they can be region specific. So if someone is located in a space where there are no laws around that, then just don’t show on the banner. And I happen to be in that one. So there’s some that aren’t as complex that have that feature, and so I still will see those. But I mean, yeah, it’s not every single website. Honestly not sure how many, but I would say maybe 50%.

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, if I was going to a website which is just purely, I don’t know, informational in content, it’s like a blog basically, then I’m sure I won’t see those kind of things because, what possible thing could they be doing? But if it’s a website where there’s some sort of login option or an option where they clearly are using analytics and they’re intending to sell that on, you do get bombarded with, there’s so many things that you can opt into and opt out of. It’s bizarre.

[00:25:40] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, it’s a challenge. And it’s definitely an area that I am working on with my plugin and stuff, and trying to wrap my head around and understand to help guide people on it. But that’s one great thing about like the modern ones. For example, if you use Plausible, you do not need a cookie banner because of Plausible. You don’t need one. It doesn’t set cookies. It doesn’t use cookies. So just because you have analytics doesn’t mean you have to have a cookie banner.

And that’s one thing I think is something that some people may not understand. You may need it for other reasons, depending on what you have going on your site. But there are sites where you just, I think there’s a lot of sites that have cookie banners that don’t actually need them because they’re so terrified of the EU cookie laws or those privacy laws that they’re like, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Lets just throw it up there and put it on there, CYA type stuff, cover your ass. Let’s just put it on there so that we don’t have to worry about it.

But Google Analytics is a little like, probably should but, you know, if you are using one of those alternatives, that analytics platform, just that itself does not mean you have to have a cookie banner. And so it’s worth investigating to see if you could switch to alternatives. Some of them have free plans that you could stay within for a website, have your clients set up their own account. And if they have very small usage then use their free plan, and stick under that limit. And then you don’t even need a cookie banner on their site. And that can help annoy their visitors less. It’s something definitely worth investigating.

[00:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: I think what I’ve noticed is that, and I could be wrong about this, my intuition though, because I see the same UI often. The cookie banner is clearly provided by the same company. Everything is the same apart from the choices that you can make, but obviously at some point they’ve ticked boxes and what have you. And it does feel a little bit like that. We don’t have the capacity to figure out what we really need to do, so what we’ll do is just enable every single option. Here’s all the choices that we could possibly provide.

And of course that itself, that feels very self-defeating. Looking at it from the end user perspective, no matter what you think about the legislation and the merits of it, the fact that every single one of us is being caught up in this sort of dragnet of clicking away, rejecting cookies and what have you. That does seem like something which is not a good experience. I mean, I don’t know how many hours humanity wastes every day rejecting cookie banners.

[00:27:57] Derek Ashauer: I mean, yeah, the cookie banners is a whole other thing. In my opinion it should be, if you’re going to do it, it should be in the browser. There should be a setting in the browser and the analytics code snippet that you have obeys the browser setting so that there’s not, there should be no need for independent, every single website owner to do their own remediation of, you know, through cookie banners of doing all this kind of stuff.

It’s bonkers to me when every single website, if every single website needs to follow this, then put it at the browser level. You can just configure in your browser, in Chrome, say, I want to accept marketing cookies and I want to not accept these types of cookies or whatever, and then call it done. And every website you go to then just includes Google Analytics, includes whatever thing. It just can look at the browser settings and follow that, and you’re done. And it saves everyone thousands of dollars, hours of headache and all this kind of stuff, and it is what it is.

[00:28:47] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like a very sensible position. I’m just wondering, is that a clarion call that is in the industries that you are following, the analytics and the marketing side of things, is that something that’s gaining momentum or no?

[00:28:59] Derek Ashauer: I haven’t heard of any movement to actually make that happen. I don’t know why I haven’t looked into it too much, but I haven’t read in the stuff that I’ve come across and reading and learning about it on my journey through this and educating myself about it. To me it seems like a pretty simple approach.

[00:29:12] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s imagine a scenario in which cookies across the board are just outlawed universally for this kind of thing in the future. And obviously that’s not something that you would desire, but let’s just imagine a scenario where that was the case.

As you call them, these modern solutions, if we were to bind that, let’s say into WooCommerce website, and obviously with Conversion Bridge, you’re all about the conversion. Does somebody arriving at the website end up doing a particular action? Do they purchase something? Do they end up at a landing page after a particular transaction has occurred, or something along those lines?

How credible do those things feel to you now? And it said that a year ago you couldn’t do it with this particular platform, and now you can. Does it feel like that whole conversion industry, you know, conversion tracking in particular, does it feel like it’s fighting a losing battle? Or does it feel like with those modern analytics companies that you’re still in the game. You can still get the data that you probably need all be it, it’s not going off to some giant third party?

[00:30:11] Derek Ashauer: So the first answer that came to mind when you’re asking that is, for example, in my testing of some of the various modern platforms, even on those, you’re getting 70% of the conversions actually getting tracked. And that could be for various reasons of JavaScript blockers, ad blockers, or things like that. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m really focusing on doing API based tracking, so that it’s server to server, not aligned to JavaScript. Because server to server, behind like, through PHP and APIs and stuff like that. If you can track what people are doing, then it’s going to be a lot more accurate actually.

That’s one thing that I’m working on for my plugin is so that whatever analytics platform you’re using, it can be as accurate as possible. But yeah, I think you’re trying to hint at it, are these other modern platforms going to go the way of Google and try and sell data? Is that kind of what you mean?

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: No, what I was meaning was, do you feel that they are credible in that, okay, so let’s imagine that I own a WooCommerce store, I’ve been using Google forever and it’s been giving me this incredibly valuable data, and I really don’t want to let go of that. But I feel, for one reason or another, maybe that’s legislation, or just a moral compulsion that I feel I have, I want to move over to these platforms. Am I throwing away a ton of useful data that I’ll never get back? Or are these modern platforms slowly but surely offering a solution, which gives me more or less what I need.

[00:31:31] Derek Ashauer: Yeah. From my perspective, what I’m seeing is when Google Analytics 4 came out, they haven’t been able to get the same level of data they used to 10 years ago with UA, Universal Analytics. Which was what we were, most of us were used to when we said Google Analytics, that’s what we had for a very, very long time, and then Google Analytics 4 came out.

I would say the platforms, some are better than others. There’s definitely some that have a lot more advanced features than others. Fathom, for example, is pretty straightforward. I wouldn’t say it’s very well geared towards detailed conversion tracking and getting good, detailed, in-depth insights. It’s good at getting page views, where they came from, what country they’re at. Something you would hand to a client so they could look at a nice little dashboard.

And Universal Analytics, it used to be great. I used to say, hey, here’s Universal Analytics, go check it out. Didn’t even have to walk them through any of it. They could look at the screen, understand the data, it made sense. Now, Google Analytics 4 is a cluster. It is for professional level marketers, and that is it at this point. You have to really know the software. There’s week long classes on how to use Google Analytics 4 these days, because it is so overwhelmingly complex. And I think it went almost too far in that regard.

But anyway, I think these modern platforms can get most site owners the data they need to make good decisions about, are my ads working if I’m doing Facebook ads? Or am I doing Google ads? Are they working for me? You know, if I’m doing link building from another site and you can tag those same UTM codes, that might be something, if you’re familiar. There are codes that you can add to the URL, with the little query and the query variables, to kind of identify that this link came from this source.

And then that can track that user throughout the process. You know, the add to cart, checkout and complete the purchase. And then know that that user came from that UTM tracking code from either somewhere on your own website or from an external website. So it can do all those great things.

So for a lot of mom and pop, WooCommerce stores I think can get a lot of great, useful data. It’s really when you are more an enterprise company, and maybe you’re doing like a million dollars a week in ad spend, you’re going to want something that is really, these crazy reports that you can run. And it’s more about the reporting than anything that you can do in GA 4 that maybe these modern platforms can’t quite do yet.

And so, like I said, for my clients, any of the clients that I’ve built sites for over the last 20 years, they don’t need any of that stuff. They would be very happy with the reports from, say, Plausible. Many of them would be happy with even Fathom, which I said, which isn’t the most conversion oriented platform. Even they would be great with those ones.

[00:34:14] Nathan Wrigley: So your plugin, which is called Conversion Bridge, what does it do? It feels from the outside as if it’s almost like a Zapier for analytics meets website, if you know what I mean. You bind your website to the analytics platform, and then you can give it, I don’t know, if this, then that kind of functionality to figure out, okay, what are the conversions?

And also it just feels like you are stripping out the technical burden of learning those platforms. Is that basically what it’s doing or have I missed the target?

[00:34:46] Derek Ashauer: That’s very close. The idea is, when I was building sites for clients, I didn’t set up any conversion tracking for a lot of them. One, because it’s just the cost, because you go buy Gravity Forms well, this site we’re going to use WS Form. Well, this site we’re going to use Ninja Forms, or this site we’re using WooCommerce, this other one we’re going to use this other, you know.

There’s so many different ways that you could do a form, do a purchase. Page builders, what button? How do I add a click tracking? Like, every time someone clicks on the buy now button on my homepage and goes to that. So we want to really track all this kind of stuff. It was a challenge of, how did you add that to your WordPress site? And so oftentimes it just didn’t happen because it was such a pain in the butt to do it.

So what Conversion Bridge tries to do is makes it easy to add the analytics tracking codes. A lot of people just cut and paste it into the header, footer, code snippets, type plugins and all this kind of stuff. That is a way to do it. It’s not really the ideal way. But it does allow you to quickly and easily add one of, I think I have 12 different analytics platforms, whether it’s Google Analytics, Fathom, all that kind of stuff. Toggle, copy and paste your just like little ID number. And then the analytics code has been added to the site where it needs to. Make sure it does it for the right users. Like, I don’t want to track admin users, let’s make sure we don’t track admin users. Stuff like that.

But the real benefit is, is that conversion tracking. So say you have a form that you’re using, and it’s just a simple, yes, add conversion tracking, done. That’s all I had to do. Click a toggle. I didn’t have to think about code snippets. How do I do it? Researching the form plugin, where does it need to get output? When does it need to get output? All this kinda stuff, it just was a pain in the butt.

And then the real benefit for agencies is that, regardless of what site they’re doing, whether they’re using Bricks Builder or Beaver Builder, using WS Form, Gravity Forms, it’s all one plugin that works for any site that you would need, because it integrates with 50 plus different WordPress plugins to just have one click toggle conversion tracking.

And websites really need conversion tracking. They need to know what users are doing on their site. And I think it’s a huge value that especially professional site builders could add to their plugin stack that they put on every client site to just, oh, all I have to do is copy, paste the little ID number from Fathom, and then I just need to check one little box in WS Form, and suddenly I have, not only analytics on the site, but I’m also tracking every single form submission.

And we can see where they’re coming from and which ones generate the most contact form leads on this website that is for a landscaper to fill out forms and get lead quotes. And now I can tell my client, these resources, whether it’s this external blog that linked to us, oh my God, we got mentioned in this blog, and all of a sudden they’re generating 50 leads a month from us. We need to do more outreach to all these blogs. And to really understand where your leads are coming from. It’s a huge value to add to client sites.

[00:37:28] Nathan Wrigley: I have a couple of questions following on from that. The first one is, have you got any examples, like curious examples, maybe unexpected examples? Because everybody gets the, okay, I want to convert, I want to track that a person arrived at the website, looked at this product and then ended up buying it, you know? Brilliant.

But are there any quirky ones that people have reached out to you that they’ve used and you thought, oh gosh, I never imagined people would want to track that conversion?

[00:37:52] Derek Ashauer: Not yet. It is pretty straightforward, you know, the things that you need to track. Form submissions, email newsletter signups are a good one. I mean purchases, stuff like that. What buttons on your page? You know, maybe you have a homepage and you want to know which button on that page actually got them to go to the buy now?

So maybe you have one in the main banner. Maybe you have one near the FAQ section. Maybe you have one near the testimonials. Which one actually got people to actually go to that page. So button tracking, link tracking is good ones. Yeah, there’s not too many surprises on that regard.

[00:38:23] Nathan Wrigley: And then the other one is about the plugins that you work with. So, and again, it sounds like your UVP really is that, look, we’ve looked at how their plugin works, how the code works, and you just tick the button. You say, I’ve got WS Form, I’ve got Gravity Forms, or whatever it may be, and now it’s just done. That’s part of the deal. You’re buying it so that you don’t have to do any coding.

[00:38:45] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, because that’s, you know, what everyone wants these days. There’s no code. And they don’t even want to, even cutting and pasting code snippets. Before it was, a lot of plugins were like, add this, you had to use this hook, and then add this code. I mean, they provided this snippet, and then you had to kind of customise it and all this kinda stuff. It’s no. Just toggle and it’s done.

You know, like for WooCommerce, it’ll send all the detailed data about the purchase. What product they purchased. How much it cost. What the order total was. So you can get all that good data in there so you can do some advanced reporting in Google Analytics or even Plausible and some other, Pirsch, and stuff like that. So these alternatives you can do as well.

[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: No code solution. Yeah, that’s nice. And the other one I suppose would be, where do you feel your audience is? Is it kind of agencies, or do you have customers who are, I don’t know, just building their own website and really don’t have any technical background? Or is it more, like I said, is it more kind of agencies who are deploying this for their clients and they have an understanding of how to set these things up?

[00:39:39] Derek Ashauer: You know, I’m doing my own market research and learning that as a business owner of how to do your, what is ICP? Ideal Customer Profile. And I’m kind of identifying that it, I think agencies would, so far, I think are the top of the list.

I know there’s some people that have bought it that are single site owners, but then I’ve learned, you know, they bought a one site license, but then I learned that they were just trying it on one site to see how it worked.

And they’re like, okay, yeah, this makes sense, and then they’re going to upgrade to, you know, a 20 site license because then they’re like, now I’m going to use this on all my client sites. This is what I’ve noticed those one site license purchases have been so far. So yeah, I think agencies do get the best of it.

But it’s also a great tool to try out because I can actually, and I have it on my development test site, but I can enable 12 different analytics platforms at once. It’s obviously not something that you would do, but you technically could. And it’s great because you can actually test different things.

Say, if you’re using Google Analytics, I want to test out Plausible. Let me try it out. Well, let me just add Google Analytics and Plausible, and everywhere you’ve checked that box on WS Form to do conversion tracking, it’ll send it to every single platform for you. You don’t have to then do a different snippet or code for, okay, now let me cut, do this snippet for WS Form in Plausible. Do this snippet for WooCommerce and Plausible. This snippet for Google Analytics and WooCommerce. It just takes care of all that for you.

So you could try, do the free trial for a week for three or four different analytics platforms. Look at the data. Okay, we ran it for a week, let’s see which one I actually do like. So it’s one little side benefit. I allowed multiple analytics platforms to make it easy for me to develop, but then I quickly realised, this is actually an advantage to test out these different platforms and see if I can get good data, and data that is usable without losing Google Analytics data while you keep maintaining that.

[00:41:13] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like there’s very few parts of our industry where politics gets in. There’s just no politics in the kind of things that I deal with. You know, what I mean by that, international politics. Not the kind of politics within the kind of baseball of WordPress, but the international politics.

It feels like this is a bit of a moving target at the moment. And it’d be curious to see if we were to do this episode again in a year’s time, whether or not the sand has shifted, and you’ve had to pivot your product because it’s moved in one direction or another. Yeah, just absolutely fascinating.

I wish you all the best. Just before we wrap it up, where do people find you? What’s the URL or the social network or both? Where can we find you? And of course, Conversion Bridge.

[00:41:55] Derek Ashauer: Yeah, conversionbridgewp.com is the Conversion Bridge plugin, and then I am pretty active on Twitter. You can find me @derekashauer on Twitter or X, I guess, sorry.

[00:42:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. As is always the case, I will drop all of the links for anything that we discuss today, including the host of analytics platforms and what have you that we mentioned. I’ll put all of those into the show notes. If you head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Derek in, all of the links will be right there.

So, Derek, it just remains for me to say thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it. It.

[00:42:24] Derek Ashauer: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

On the podcast today we have Derek Ashauer.

Having spent over 15 years in the WordPress arena, Derek has transitioned from building client sites to creating specialised WordPress plugins. Today, we get to hear about his journey creating Conversion Bridge, a tool specifically designed to streamline the process of implementing analytics platforms and conversion tracking on WordPress websites.

We start with an overview of analytics, tracing its evolution from the simple server logs of the early internet days, to the sophisticated data gathering mechanisms provided by Google Analytics and others.

We explore how the introduction of European privacy laws has significantly impacted the data landscape, challenging marketers and businesses to adapt to a new era, where data privacy is regarded differently in different locales.

Derek offers his perspectives on this rapidly changing field, discussing the rise of modern, privacy-focused analytics platforms like Fathom, Plausible, and others. He explains how these technologies employ cookieless tracking techniques to respect user privacy, while still providing valuable insights for website owners.

We also address the problem of data accessibility and user privacy. Derek, sharing his personal views as a marketer, acknowledges the complexity of balancing effective marketing strategies with ethical data use. He explains his thoughts on why modern solutions might strike a better balance, ensuring that user data remains private while allowing businesses to glean just the insights they need.

Whether you’re managing a WooCommerce store or building sites for clients, Derek’s insights into conversion tracking will be of interest. He talks about some of the hurdles site builders face with traditional systems and how Conversion Bridge simplifies conversion tracking across various platforms and plugins without the need for extensive coding.

If you’re an agency, developer, or digital marketer, this discussion will help equip you with knowledge and strategies to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of web analytics.

Useful links

Derek on X

Sunshine Photo Cart

Conversion Bridge

Fathom Analytics

Plausible Analytics

Pirsch Analytics

Usermaven

Introducing the next generation of Analytics, Google Analytics 4