Tracking Without Tracking Individuals

The defaults collect more than you need

A property is created with a set of options already enabled, chosen to suit organisations that want detailed audience information for advertising.

A small business measuring how many people enquired does not need most of it, and did not choose it.

Turning several of them down costs nothing in the reports you actually read, and reduces what is being collected about the people visiting your site.

It also makes your privacy policy easier to write honestly, since describing what you collect is simpler when you collect less.

What is worth turning down

• Cross-site and cross-device identification.
• Advertising personalisation if you do not advertise.
• Data sharing options beyond what you need.
• Granular location below city level.
• Detailed device information you never read.
• User identification across sessions.

Each is a switch in the administration section, and none of them affects visitor counts, traffic sources, landing pages, or conversions.

The signals setting specifically

The one worth understanding rather than simply switching.

There is a feature that connects your analytics to a broader set of signed-in behaviour, which enables demographic reporting and richer advertising audiences.

Enabling it means more information about individuals is associated with your visits. It also unlocks age and interest reporting, which is the reason people turn it on.

For a local business, demographic reporting is interesting and rarely actionable: knowing that your visitors skew slightly older does not change what you do next week.

If you do not advertise and do not act on demographics, leaving it off is the proportionate choice.

If you do advertise and use audiences, it earns its place, and that is a decision to make deliberately rather than by default.

Location is finer than you think

A setting people are frequently surprised by.

Location is derived from the network address, and by default it is recorded at a reasonably fine level.

For a business serving one city, knowing a visitor was in that city is useful and knowing which part is not.

The granularity can be reduced to city level, which keeps every geographic report a small business reads and removes detail nobody looks at.

The same applies to detailed device and browser information, most of which sits unread while adding to what is held about somebody.

The test is simple: if you cannot name a decision that a field would inform, collecting it is habit rather than measurement.

A worked example

A business reviewed the settings on a property created eight months earlier and had never opened the administration section.

Cross-device identification was enabled, all data sharing options were on, and location was at the default granularity.

They did not advertise and had never opened a demographic report.

They turned off the identification feature, reduced two of the sharing options, and set location to city level.

Every report they actually used, which was visitors, sources, landing pages, and conversions, looked identical afterwards.

What changed was the honesty of their privacy policy, which had described a lighter arrangement than the one they had been running.

Collect less and lose nothing

The point worth making plainly, since reducing collection sounds like a sacrifice.

The figures a small business acts on are counts and proportions: how many came, where from, which page, how many enquired.

None of those requires identifying an individual across sites, associating them with a signed-in profile, or knowing which neighbourhood they were in.

So the reduction removes detail you were not using rather than accuracy you were.

That is a rare kind of change: better on privacy, no worse on measurement, and it takes about ten minutes.

Then say what you do

The step that makes the configuration meaningful outside the account.

Your privacy policy should describe what you actually collect, and for most sites it was written from a template that describes something else.

Having reduced the settings, update the policy to match: what is collected, roughly why, how long it is kept, and who else can see it.

A shorter, accurate description is better than a longer, borrowed one, and it is considerably easier to write after this exercise than before.

This is a general description rather than advice on your obligations, which depend on where you operate and what you collect.

Check it after any change

Because these settings do not stay where you put them permanently.

New options appear as the product develops, and some arrive enabled.

A new property created later, for a second site or by a supplier, starts from the defaults again rather than inheriting your choices.

And a supplier granted access can change them without anybody being told.

Add a look at the data settings to whatever annual review you already do, alongside the retention period and the access list, which are in the same part of the interface.

Who else can see it

A related question that belongs in the same review and is asked less often than the settings.

Analytics access accumulates: a former designer, an agency you no longer use, a contractor who set something up, and occasionally somebody nobody recognises.

Each of those can read everything your property collects about your visitors, which is a privacy question as much as a security one.

Open the access list, remove anybody who no longer needs it, and reduce anybody who has more permission than their role requires.

It is the same five minutes as the settings above and it sits two screens away, which makes it a natural thing to do at the same time.

The counter-case

There are legitimate reasons to leave these on.

A business running paid advertising and building audiences genuinely uses the identification features, and turning them off removes capability it is paying for.

Demographic reporting is also useful for some businesses, particularly those making decisions about what to stock or who to target, and dismissing it as vanity is not right for everybody.

There is also a limit to what any of this achieves, since the larger privacy question is which company holds your visitor data at all, and adjusting settings within one product does not address that.

Turn down what you do not use, keep what you do, and consider a lighter tool entirely if the settings conversation keeps arriving.

The ten minutes

1. Open the data settings under administration.
2. Turn off cross-device identification if you do not advertise.
3. Review each data sharing option.
4. Reduce location granularity to city level.
5. Check your reports still show what you use.
6. Update your privacy policy to match.
7. Recheck annually and on any new property.

Step five is the reassurance, since every figure a small business acts on survives all of the above unchanged.

Measuring without the usual mechanism is covered in analytics without cookies.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.