Customer Data Platforms: A better way to deal with analytics data

Thanks to recent privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), website owners already had to sit down and think about how they collect, store and process the personally identifable information (PII).

Recently I revisited the current landscape of tools to facilitate this process, and updated my current recommendations on the best way to approach customer data in 2024.

Nobody likes to be followed around the web

One of the challenges that arose from allowing users to easily opt out of certain kinds of data collection and processing was a huge drop in effective analytics to gage how well your site is running, which content is the most interesting to your users and what areas to optimize.

At the same time, users that are fed up with a constant barrage of ads and exhaustive tracking of their every move install ad blockers into their browsers and devices, to lock out any known ad and tracking providers. Google even felt the need to go as far as significantly limiting ad blocking in the Chrome browser.

Tracking site performance is not illegal

Recent privacy regulations never had a problem with website owners tracking how their website performs or how their users interact with it. The issue arises when tracking user behaviour is synonymous with blasting out private data to (oftentimes foreign) companies, without asking or even informing users.

The least you can do

…to reliably collect usage information of your site, is running an open source analytics platform, where all the data you collect belongs to you, and is not automatically shared out to global corporations or the highest bidder.

Matomo is just one of many tools, but will feel the most familiar to anyone who used Google Analytics before. It can be selhosted “On Premise” on any cheap PHP server, and even allows you to setup multiple tenants, or seperate sites within one instance.

A more advanced setup

However, you would probably still like to integrate with marketing platforms, and monitor the effectiveness of your paid social or search ads or connect usage data with your support platform.

In the past, you would load a bunch of tracking scripts and pixels into your site and call it a day. It was never a great solution for performance, and allowd all third party tools free reign over your customer’s data. That makes it a big no-no.

Instead, collecting the data once — via a tool that you control, which doesn’t leak any information by default — makes a lot more sense. This allows you to kick third party cookies and scripts from your site, resulting in a privacy-by-default approach while ensuring a higher data quality at the same time.

Then, once your visiors actually do opt-in to share their data for marketing or third party analytics purposes, you can distribute the same events you already collected in your first party analytics tool, to those third party providers.

So, what exactly is a CDP?

A Customer Data Platform is the name for the piece of software that collects, unifies, stores and/or forwards this data to the destinations you define.

One of the most well known tools is called Segment (acquired by twilio in 2020). They offer a no-code solution for tracking, storing and distributing customer data out of the box, to get you started.

They offer a large set of predefined Destinations, to push the collected data to, and additional functionaility can be added via code right in their dashboard.

The landscape of available CDP tools and platforms is currently still very much geared towards large enterprises, that already have very complex data pipelines and the budget to string together a range of tools, but nevertheless this seems to be the only way forward to generate both private and effective insights from the data you collect.