I’m working with TraceDock to improve your data accuracy

As of June 2019 I’m working together with a startup from The Netherlands called TraceDock. TraceDock is a tool that helps companies (re)capture missing analytics data and improve it’s accuracy. All within your existing analytics solution and with minimal added configuration.

I’m now actively helping them with business development and providing product feedback as I onboard new clients. (If you’re interested, schedule a 30 minute demo with me.)

What is the problem with Data Accuracy?

Currently there are 3 big problems in the digital analytics realm and they are growing in size as we speak. All of them impact the data quality that you as a company base your decisions on and which you use to improve the customer experience for your end users.

1. Firewalls that Block tracking domains
   Increasingly, system admins include blocking lists of known tracking domains to cut off tracking capabilities at a network level. Also, open source initiatives such as Pi-Hole make this relatively easy to do for private users. It is not uncommon for those blocking lists to include your analytics tool such as Google Analytics.
   
   
2. AdBlockers and Tracking Blockers blocking Analytics
   AdBlockers are not new and have been growing in popularity for some time now. Added to that are “tracking blockers” like Ghostery. A lot of them now include the option to outright block Google Analytics and/or Google Tag Manager by default.
   
   
3. Safari’s ITP and other browsers cookie handling changes
   Cookies are becoming a less effective way to measure user behavior over multiple sessions due to things like Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and recent changes to Mozilla and Edge. This results in the important “User Metric” becoming way less accurate.

All of this results in you ending up with an imperfect view of who visited your website because of missing traffic. This missing traffic will often include paid traffic which you would like to be able to evaluate for it’s effectiveness.

The traffic that does get measured, gets increasingly less accurate when it comes to multiple sessions being attributed to the same user (because of ITP).

For starters, your Conversion Rate Optimization (AB testing) efforts will experience missing traffic and missing conversions. Also the likelihood of a user being in both Variant A and Variant B within the same test increases because of ITP.

Advertising Attribution for customer journeys longer than 1 day also significantly decreases in accuracy, resulting in a diminishing ability to optimize your advertising campaigns for effectiveness.

All of these problems (seem to) come from a growing demand for privacy. None of these things are good for your business, and I’d argue they are also detrimental to your ability to offer a great customer experience for your users. However, this post is not about debating the morality of this privacy movement and the effect of it. (Will blog about that soon.)

In comes TraceDock

TraceDock aims to solve all 3 of these problems. It does this by combining 3 main elements:

1. TraceDock runs on your own (sub)domain.
2. TraceDock creates it’s own ID which is stored in localStorage.
3. TraceDock detects if Analytics is firing or not, and only when blocked will send a hit via Serverside (measurement protocol).

This makes it the ideal hybrid solution that works well with your existing implementation and requires minimal configuration to work.

For the clients that I work with now I’ve seen between 7% and 27% of additional traffic being measured and a 100% accuracy of transactions and revenue compared to backend systems.

After experimenting with TraceDock for a month and experiencing how quickly the team resolves the issues I ran in to or the additional functions I proposed I decided to see if we could work together more intensively.

Interested? Contact me

Interested? I’m currently on-boarding clients and would be more than happy to give you a 30 minute video-call demo to explain the tool to you. I’m also really curious as to any feedback you might have about the tool after the demo.

Please use the link below to find a time slot for a 30 minute demo!