Case Study

"What am I missing?"

As we outline here, privacy-first browsing neutralizes 72,000+ cookies, pixels, scripts, tags, and trackers. This affects over 800 martech companies, many of whom are household names.

This state of affairs impacts analytics data in profound ways. Our research suggests we may only see 11% of available events. That's not a typo. And it means that, in some cases, we could be wasting $0.89 of every $1 we spend on our marketing tools.

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This tweet made us wonder ...

"How much data do analytics platforms like Mixpanel and Google Analytics typically miss? How much can Confection help users recover?"

Let's Find Out

So we ran an experiment. It went like this:

We have hundreds of videos embedded on company-specific landing pages.

Each video is hidden from Vimeo, can be embedded and played exclusively here (@ confection.io), and only appears on one page.

Confection Impact Videos @ Vimeo

Bottom line:

If someone plays one of these videos, they do so @ confection.io and nowhere else.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

Vimeo tells one story.

Between 1/29 and 2/4/21, visitors to confection.io watched 16 videos on 16 pages 46 times.

On average, visitors watched 56% of each video. Each play in the chart resulted in the visitor watching at least 15% of the video.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

Google Analytics tells another.

Between 1/29 and 2/4/21, Google Analytics logged just 9 relevant pageviews.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

Four of these pageviews logged no time on page (0:00:00).

A video play, like any page interaction, would trigger > 0 values. As such, it’s possible none of the the 0:00:00 pageviews are associated with video plays.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

Assuming a 1:1: relationship between pageviews and video plays ...

We’d expect to see 46 pageviews in Google Analytics. At minimum, we’d expect to see 16.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

However, at best ...

Google Analytics was only able to log 20% of the relevant events. At worst, it was only able to log 11%. In either case, 80-89% of events went untracked.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

We know what you're thinking: "What about bots?"

"Did Google Analytics filter that traffic out? Could that explain the discrepancy?"

The short answer is, "It's unlikely." A longer answer follows:

No system is perfect, but confection.io uses Cloudflare's various bot management tools to keep this kind of traffic at bay. Combining these tools with Vimeo's privacy resources gives us a reasonable degree of confidence that Vimeo Analytics captured real video plays that took place during real pageviews by real people.

So why is Google Analytics is missing 80-89% of the same pageview events?

We believe those visitors used privacy-first browsers, tools, or settings that blocked scripts like google-analytics.com/analytics.js and google-analytics.com/ga.js Blocking these scripts on the browser level would prevent transmission of pageview events from confection.io to our Google Analytics account.

See This in Action @ confection.io/demo

After analyzing hundreds of different sites, we've discovered seven different Google Analytics scripts neutralized by privacy-first. And we've found at least one of these scripts on 72% of the sites we've analyzed. In other words, while the 80-89% figure did surprise us -- we expected 20-25% -- this is a very common issue. Like Mixpanel and the other data gathering applications we include on our demo, Google Analytics is heavily impacted by privacy first.

We have found two blocked Vimeo scripts, but these attempt to gather information about the page on which the video iframe is embedded. The iframe and video inside it are unaffected.

Why is this?

Browsers treat the video iframe itself like a top-level browser window. This means that, in essence, when played via iframe, Vimeo video embeds are just sending data directly from vimeo.com to vimeo.com It's as if the video itself is playing on vimeo.com instead of confection.io, and this sort of first-party data transfer triggers far fewer privacy-first alarms.

We thought we were living in an environment of 20-25% waste.

Based on this, it’s actually 3x that (or more). So much for waiting until 2022.

“What are the financial implications of this?”

Google Analytics is a free platform.

Imagine this is Mixpanel, Segment, &c. You're suddenly wasting $0.89 of every $1 spent.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

What kind of impact can Confection can have on your business?

Let’s zoom way, way out to get a true sense of scale.

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Internally, @ confection.io, where we have maximum visibility …

Between February 23 and March 18, 2021, GA logged 6,549 pageviews while Confection logged 23,522.

If we didn't have it installed @ confection.io, 72% of our data would have been lost.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

If this were a paid solution that cost $1,000/mo ...

Confection would have helped saved us $722.

If we didn't have it installed, the paid solution would have only been about 30% effective. We'd have wasted 70%+ of our spending.

Confection Impact Video @ Vimeo

Pivot to Privacy First

See our solution in action. Confection can help keep your customer relationships and marketing partnerships strong, even in browsers that restrict cookies, scripts, and persistent IDs.

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Choose your next step. You're in control.

Confection uses an innovative architecture to collect, store, and distribute data, one that's unaffected by client-side disruptions. There's no need to worry about cookies, cross-domain scripts, or device IDs. Confection is also compliant with global privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD so it's good for people too.

And it integrates with the apps businesses and developers already use. There's no need to switch systems. Just plug in, power up, and keep your marketing partnerships running strong.

"I'm ready to try it."

Get Started (Risk Free)

"I want to see a demo."

Let’s Go

"I have some questions."

Contact Us

"I want to see this."

Share It

"How much does this cost?"

View Pricing Guide

"I want to learn more about Confection."

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