Case Study
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.
Our client-side integration with Mixpanel lost ~50% of events to ad blockers. I know this because of our "Upgrade To Paid" event: the actual subscription count in Stripe was always around half of what showed up in Mixpanel. Now I'm removing all client-side analytics.
— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) December 15, 2020
"How much data do analytics platforms like Mixpanel and Google Analytics typically miss? How much can Confection help users recover?"
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.
"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.
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.
Based on this, it’s actually 3x that (or more). So much for waiting until 2022.
Let’s zoom way, way out to get a true sense of scale.
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.