Google Analytics Opt out plug-in
19th March 2010 by Emily Mace
Google have announced on their Analytics blog this week that they have been working on a plug-in for browsers where visitors to your website can opt out of sharing data with Google Analytics.
This new opt-out option will enable people to visit your website and their visit not to show in your Google Analytics Account. This will mean that the statistics about visitors and page views that you receive in your Analytics won’t be an accurate representation of what is going on with your website.
One of the issues with this new plug in is that if it takes off other analytics providers might have to think about offering this kind of tool so that users are able to choose what website owners can see about what they are doing.
Another thing that flags in my mind when reading this blog from Google is that they are making the effort to allow users to stop sending information to website owners whilst launching tools such as Buzz and Web History, both of which are turned on by default.
Web History works when you are logged into Google and records your previous searches tailoring future searches around your previous behaviour. Web History also records search history from Google using a Cookie when a user is not logged in. Although you can remove items from your web history Google haven’t made a big song and dance about how to access this information and stop Google recording it. So it’s interesting that they are offering users the option of opting out of reporting to your website statistics that they visited the site.
I’m not sure how many users will make the effort to install the plug-in to their browser but there will be some users who will do this. What isn’t made clear in Google’s post from yesterday is if the new plug-in will be part of the Google Toolbar, which would obviously make it more accessible to internet users than if it is a standalone plug-in.
The new plug-in tool is currently being worked on by Google’s engineers and Google hope that it will be released soon. I look forward to seeing how this new plug will be promoted so that we can work out the number of users likely to use it and the impact this could have on your tracking of your SEO work.
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