We Make Plans

We all use Google to search the internet. It is great. But let’s face it: Google is not a search company, it is an advertising company.

Like most companies we have used Google Analytics (GA) on our website. We had some concerns with this when GDPR was introduced here in Norway but with their IP Anonymization setting we continued using it.

However we rarely looked at the statistics. Partly because we were too busy with other things but another reason is that GA has become quite complex. While GA can give you many detailed insights, getting a clear simple overview of popular content, best performing lead generating sources or device usage was always a quest within many layers of menus and functions.

But not only wanted we something simpler we also wanted a solution that would not track behaviour of our users and used gathered data to sell advertising.

The solution for that is simple: Use an analytics tool that do not use cookies to identify users and track behaviour beyond simple page metrics/events. After some research we found the plausible solution for us was Plausible Analytics. It has a basic set of features including event tracking, an easy to use webapp and good support. And most importantly: they took privacy seriously and store data within the EU.

Not only does this align better with our company goals but it also allows us to delete the following section from our terms of service:

This information can be shared with third parties that may aggregate and sell this usage information to others, in such cases user and end-customer, including IP-address, is anonymized.

The above sentence has now been removed from our terms.

We have also had email open tracking enabled for a while. This is now disabled. Not only do we think we should not be able to see when your customers opens an email booking confirmation, but we actually very seldom had the use for it (only occasionally when a customer would complain that an email was not sent - in most cases it showed as ‘opened’ though).

Note: The MakePlans booking site will continue to support Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager if you choose to add those services to your account. Our Google Analytics snippet has always anonymized IP. This will allow you to use GA/GTM to see statistics and track events such as completed bookings. The booking site can also be used with Plausible Analytics and other third party solutions but we do not offer a built-in way of including it. You can however add their snippets in the footer section of the booking site settings in your account.