Why privacy-first analytics is worth the trade

Every analytics tool asks you to make a trade. The usual one is your visitors’ privacy in exchange for precision that most sites never act on.

We made the opposite trade here about two years ago. We lost the ability to follow one person across a fortnight of visits. We kept everything we were actually using: which pages get read, where people arrive from, what happens on a phone rather than a laptop.

What nobody warns you about is how much simpler the rest of the job gets afterwards. No consent banner to keep working. No processing agreement to file. No quarterly conversation about whether a particular cookie counts as strictly necessary.

It is not the right trade for every site. If your business depends on advertising to individuals after they leave, you need the tools that do that and the paperwork that comes with them. We do not, and it turned out most of our clients do not either.