An Opt-out for Google Analytics On the Way?

One day you might wake up to find your website’s traffic has taken a dramatic drop. Don’t panic! Your customers might just have opted out of Google Analytics and thus disappeared from your screen. Recently, Google announced plans to offer a Google Analytics opt-out:

“Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.”

Why Google is offering an opt-out

When I first saw this news, I naturally recoiled at the idea of voluntarily allowing measurable data to slip through our hands. Rationalizing web analytics data is already hard enough, and now it will be even harder.

But I was not surprised. There are increasing concerns about privacy issues and Google’s products. This week, a open letter co-signed by officials in privacy commissioner roles in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and 10 other countries was sent to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, raising concerns about privacy issues in Google Buzz and Google Street View.

What does this opt-out mean for Google Analytics Users?

In my opinion, it is highly doubtful that this will do any substantial harm to Google Analytics and its users. Here is my point of view:

First of all, not all users will know about the opt-out plug in, and only a few of them will actually download and install it. And most of those people will be privacy fanatics who might have already blocked the cookies or enabled javascript to make themselves invisible on the tracking list.

Second, even if we assume that there are some people who will undoubtedly adopt the opt-out plug in, it’s still unlikely to strike a deadly blow to web analytics. As far as I know, web analytics is more concerned about data trending, not the data numbers themselves. So even if the numbers drop a little, the trending data will remain valuable for web analytics.

And Google are not foolish enough to kill their own business. If the new plug in did have a negative impact on Google Analytics in the future, Google would find a way around it.

3 Ways to Prepare

Even the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can affect a tornado, so the opt-out plug in will definitely have an impact. There are some things we should start thinking about before it goes live.

1. Benchmark our traffic and known visitors before and after the release of the Opt-Out so we can evaluate the impact on our traffic measurement and whether the traffic drop-off is correlated to the visitors we need to meet our site’s goals.
2. Be ready to accommodate the bias that Google Analytics opt out incurs on our metrics.
3. Be ready to have another analytics tool as a backup.