Simplify for Success

Mar 11, 2022

In today's episode, we will talk to Adriaan van Rossum, one of the founders of Simple Analytics. After the recent decision by the Austrian Data Protection Authority against the use of Google Analytics, many are searching for alternatives. I'm sure you'll find this podcast insightful.

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Simplify for Success

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Automated transcript

Priya Keshav (00:18):

Hello everyone. Welcome to our podcast around simplifying for success. Simplification requires discipline and clarity of thought. This is not often easy. In today's rapid paced work. Environment, we've invited a few colleagues in data and information governance space to share their strategies and approaches for simplification.

(00:34):

In today's episode, we will talk to Adriaan van Rossum, one of the founders of Simple Analytics. After the recent decision by the Austrian Data Protection Authority against the use of Google Analytics, many are searching for alternatives. I'm sure you'll find this podcast insightful.

Priya Keshav (00:51):

Hi Adriaan, welcome to the show.

Adriaan van Rossum (00:54):

Hi, Priya. Thanks for having me.

Priya Keshav (00:57):

So tell me a little bit about yourself and how did you get started on Simple Analytics?

Adriaan van Rossum (01:07):

Yeah, sure. So it was about four years ago that I started Simple Analytics, but before that, I had some experience as a web developer. I'm from the Netherlands now live in Amsterdam, and I always had an interest in building websites. I learned from people around me and I also learned that you could do a lot of stuff that is not super privacy friendly. And as a developer I think, and many other developers probably notice is a lot what the web is capable of. For example, when I started building websites, it was still possible to get someone's clipboard history. So you would copy paste something in a Word document, you would visit the website and that website could get your clipboard, so it could be very personal data. You copy paste everything.

(02:03):

So this made me realise that, hey, if this is possible, how would it be for the end user? No one expects this, right? So then it started to be of an interest of how this all works, and then I basically started to have interest in privacy and what it entails, but then it was always a little bit on the background and didn't really do something in privacy that much, but I always had an interest in it. And then four years ago, it was in 2018, I needed to instal some analytics tech for a customer. And I was like, yeah, I don't really want to do this. I don't want to feed all this data to Google Analytics, so what should I do? What is the alternative? And I didn't really find an alternative that suited my needs, and then I realised maybe I should build it myself. So then I started building Simple Analytics, a super simple version at that time, and people already had an interest in it. There were quite some people that just wanted to know how many pages they had or how many pages were visited. So for them it was already providing value. And in the years after, we developed a platform quite a bit, and also GDPR made a few of those changes in the landscape that people actually need to use something more privacy friendly.

Priya Keshav (03:35):

So obviously after the recent Austrian data Protection authorities decision on Google Analytics use privacy friendly alternatives to Google Analytics, which maybe not four years ago, in my mind at least, I would've never thought about it till then You kind of just assumed that that's a default. So now it has become a lot more relevant and people realise that there aren't that many alternatives at all. So tell me a little bit more about what Simple Analytics does and how is it different from Google? I mean, I understand that it's more privacy preserving, but I was kind of fascinated to read some of your blogs in terms of you don't collect actual IP addresses, you don't collect a number of attributes that are default with Google, for example.

Adriaan van Rossum (04:39):

Yeah, so there's quite a difference with Google Analytics and Simple Analytics, although we use it quite a bit to say what is simple analytics? We'll just say it's a privacy first alternative to Google Analytics. So people instantly get it, but there's quite some differences. For example, our interface is completely different. We have a one page dashboard versus a very complex dashboard. In Google Analytics, we are very lightweight, they're quite heavyweight, but there's also some things that are better to calculate if you track people that makes sense. So if you can track a person from page to page how long the session was for that person, how many pages they visited, which pages they visited. So that kind of information, you can't really gather without tracking people. So with Simple Analytics, we decided to like, Hey, we want to have a way that we at least can show the unique page views and normal page views, the time on pace, all that stuff that's still doable without invading the privacy.

(05:43):

So for example, how we do our visitors is we check if the person came from a different website or came from the same website. If it's from the same website, then we know, okay, this is a non-unique page view. And with Google it's like a cookie that's placed or an IP address or a hash or something like that where they will track you for a longer period of time. And that's also one of the bigger difference with Simple Analytics and other competitors as well. Also privacy friendly competitors is most of them still use the IP address in a certain way. And I don't really think that's the best idea because if you still use it for one week, then we need to trust you on that and you can still track a person for that whole week or a day or something like that. And I think it's a bit of a grey zone to be in. And with Simple Analytics, you always want to be like a hundred percent sure this is legally accepted and you will never get any privacy issues with that. So we go for a different way and that's without any IP address or fingerprinting or tracking or whatsoever.

Priya Keshav (06:58):

So tell me a little bit more. So it makes sense that it is obviously a lot more privacy preserving and as a customer when you're browsing the site, when they're not fingerprinting you and they're not tracking your IP address, you feel a lot more safer. But having said that, if we, let's say have a website like ours where we don't have shopping carts and you're not doing complex analytics, all you're trying to do is to understand how useful your pages for your customers, this makes sense. But if I am, let's say a retailer and I am trying to understand bounce rates, I'm trying to understand abandoned card tracking or I'm trying to also do some cross target advertising and things like that, I mean without tracking IP addresses and without doing any of that, I can't get some of those things to work anymore. Pretty much I couldn't look at abandoned cards if I don't know who the user is.

Adriaan van Rossum (08:02):

So we need to change our mindset a bit before we could do everything we wanted on the internet and track everything we wanted. And now there's regulations saying, Hey, we'll protect individual that visits your website. You're not allowed to do so anymore. And there are so many things that are not allowed to do anymore because of that. I think we're going in the right direction, but we really need to think differently. So do we need to collect this data? Do we really do something with the data? If we have collected it all, the kind of questions are very important to ask internally or with your team, like, Hey, is this really needed? And of course with e-commerce or something like that, it's very much based on tracking how is the flow going, how many people come in, how many shopping carts are filled, and stuff like that.

(09:03):

So we need to be very creative in finding ways to still get those numbers but then in a different way and they will be less accurate. But that's a trade-off that we have to do with taking the more private path. And in the last few years we really didn't care about it at all. And I think if it was forbidden in that time, we would have developed so many different ways to get valuable insights in those key numbers. So it's just a matter of time. And then there's plenty of products to choose from and people are known to like, okay, we can't do this, but maybe we should do this. And then you find a solution to problems that you need answers for.

Priya Keshav (09:50):

So there are alternatives to Simple Analytics and Google. Would you want to talk a little bit about where you fall and how you compare and contrast against some of your competition?

Adriaan van Rossum (10:04):

Yeah, I briefly said something about it that we are more in the green zone than in the grey zone, as in we're not European business, which makes it easier also for our customers to choose us because we need to follow local regulations and we need to have our servers within Europe as well. And however, we're different from different tools. It really depends on the tool, but I would say we are at the far end spectrum of privacy. So we take privacy a bit further than most of them. There's a lot of tools around owning the data, for example, that you are the data owner yourself with Simple. That's also the case, but we go one step further and we say it's not only that you own the data, but we want to be a hundred percent sure that you collect the data in a privacy acceptable way where you don't consent for. So that's also a difference with some tools and we always try to pick the best privacy solution within our reach that we can provide.

Priya Keshav (11:18):

So let's talk about this concept of data ownership. Our podcast listeners, we have a broad spectrum of people on how they sort of interpret data ownership. You obviously mentioned that with simple analytics, you are a service provider. So the company that sort of owns the data and it is their data. And then there are some privacy friendly products, which kind of start with that concept. But with Google Analytics, you don't own the data,

Adriaan van Rossum (11:48):

You don't own the data if you're using Google Analytics. Yeah.

Priya Keshav (11:51):

Why?

Adriaan van Rossum (11:56):

Because you're basically giving them the data for themselves. Also, you sign some terms when using Google Analytics saying, Hey, we can use this data in other platforms, which in my mind means you can use it in Google Networks as well, which is something that really makes sense from the Google perspective. So they have this huge amount of data coming from all websites around the internet, which they can use to for their other products like Google Ads and Google search. So yeah, it's pretty clear that you don't own the data with Google Analytics because they use it for so many other things than the service they provide to you. And I think that's the whole problem. If services that are free, if you don't pay for our service, then the company needs to find a way to pay for that. So Google has found their way and simple chose to just charge money for it. So we don't need to have other ways to sell data from our customers so we can really say it's your data and we don't care about it. You can delete it, you can do whatever with the data you want.

Priya Keshav (13:18):

So in other words, you don't really use the data for anything. You don't further sell the data, you don't analyse that data, you don't process that data in any other way. So it's basically you are the service provider providing service to the customer.

Adriaan van Rossum (13:35):

Yeah, yeah. And there's also customers that just use this for collecting data. So they say like, okay, we trust you guys. If collecting the data in a legal way, just send the data our way or they get the data out of our systems and then they process it themselves in their own tools. So that's also a way that people use Simple.

Priya Keshav (13:58):

And you mentioned that since you're a European company, the data is hosted in Europe and so you don't have to worry about cross-border transfer of data, which has been one of the issues with Google obviously. Tell me a little bit more about your product being light. How does that make a difference to a website when it is lighter compared to what Google Analytics provides?

Adriaan van Rossum (14:28):

So there's basically two ways to look at it. So you can say the website. So you can say the website loading time is important, so how fast your website loads for the visitor. And it can also be lightweight in the UX device. So we have a lightweight tool so it's easy to understand and the dashboard and stuff like that. But the first one, the loading time is quite important for loading your website. You want to score certain points basically on how fast your website is. If it takes a second too long, then maybe someone leaves your website and you lost that customer. So you don't really want to have that. So you want to have a performance website and Google provides some tools to check if your website is performing. They use certain indicators, they call it core web vitals. And that's basically a few ways to calculate if your website is still fast.

(15:31):

And they say they'll use these metrics also in their search algorithms. So you probably perform better if your website loads faster, you perform better in the Google search ranking, which is great. So they provide some tools for that. For the end user, it's nice because you have a fast website that shows up on top insert. We did some tests with simple analytics on a website and then with Google Analytics, and then we compare those two. And the funny thing is that you can get a hundred points for your website. So without any script, we had 98.2 points, so that's without any analytics. And then we added Simple Analytics and then we had 98.0, so there's only 0.2 difference. And then we changed Simple Analytics to Google Analytics, and then we got like 88.9. So that's basically 10 points below the highest number. So you can see that there's a huge difference when using Google Analytics versus Simple Analytics just based on their own algorithms and their own core web vital indicators. So that, yeah, it was quite interesting to see, and that's what we mean when we say lightweight. It almost has no impact on the performance of your website while Google Analytics has a way bigger impact your website.

Priya Keshav (17:03):

So another topic that I kind of want to drill down further in. So you don't track IP addresses, but you can tell maybe not with precision that let's say Priya visited your website from Houston, but you could tell that Priya visited somewhere from Texas or how does that work? Can you tell us, you said you have to make some compromises, but it would be nice to kind of understand how much of a compromise it is?

Adriaan van Rossum (17:37):

Yeah, exactly. So we will not know if we have visited three times. We also don't know if the same user visited three times. What we can see is that a user is from a certain country, so the country is something that basically the browser sends the time zone of the user to the website. And that's the part we collect. So we collect the time zone from the browser so we don't have to touch the IP address. So then the time zone could be anything. For example, Europe, Amsterdam is a time zone. So then in our system we all match like, oh, this is from Amsterdam, well then it's in the Netherlands. So then we still know it's a person from the Netherlands. We don't know anything more from that person, just that their time zone was set to the Netherlands. And this works quite well because every country has one or more time zones, and most of the time zones of all the machines are automatically set up.

(18:54):

So if you travel, your time zone changes with you. This is basically the same as on your phone. You have the time and if you travel, the time changes with the location you're at. And then also the time zone changes in the browser. So that's basically the way it works, and we think that's the great approach. But at the same time, I'm also not, what also could be a solution is that you get the IP address, the time that a person visits your website and you just check like, Hey, is this IP address from a certain country? And then you just drop the IP address, but you still have the country. And I think that's still fine because you're not saving the IP address and you're just matching it with a database that's already in your system. So it's not that you store the IP address ever, it's just that you match it with a database. I think that's also a good solution. But yeah, again, we are a little bit on the safe side, so we use the time zone and we don't touch the IP address.

Priya Keshav (20:01):

So in that sense, I mean, I'd like to kind of make it relevant to a US user. So who's listening to this podcast? So in this case, you're probably going to be able to say that Priya visited in the central time zone, but you may not be able to pinpoint whether I'm in Chicago or I'm in Texas or I'm in Illinois or Texas. So you can't give me a state specific or a city specific location information, but you can give me an approximate saying that it's US. And in the central region?

Adriaan van Rossum (20:32):

Yeah, I can say it's in the US, that's what we'll store. So not even the central region. We'll just say US.

Priya Keshav (20:42):

Oh, okay. Sounds good. Any other closing thoughts that you would like to share?

Adriaan van Rossum (20:49):

Well, I think the whole privacy thing is now really, really starting up. And you see that we briefly touched it with Google Analytics, that they are already forbidden in a few countries in Europe. And I think I really feel it is just the beginning. So if businesses still think like, oh, we can probably wait a bit, it's just a matter of time that you really have to do something about it. So I would say that for most businesses it's very important to already look at a few solutions because it takes a while before you implement. So probably you want to know what data you get, you want to test a few tools. And yeah, I think it's important to take a step now because it's only going further and more private privacy minded. There's many regulations that are being created in the EU as well for even further down or more privacy for the individuals.

(21:53):

So yeah, it's just a matter of time that you can't use the tools that you are already using. So better get familiar with the tools that you can use and try to find a mindset that allows to get numbers in a different way without getting the numbers from one specific version so that you don't see, hey, pre-app is this website time three times, but a person named X whatever, visit this website three times. And for the end user or for the analyst or the marketeer, it's all fine. They don't care about the name of the person. So if we take little steps into that direction, I think we'll be better for every visitor.

Priya Keshav (22:41):

No, I totally agree with you, but I'm just going to speak from a perspective of an analytics person or somebody within the corporation making these decisions. Last 10, 15 years, we've sort of evolved into this model, not purposefully, but it just sort of happened because it's possible. And there were a number of things that we never considered. So there was no alternative to Google Analytics. So nobody was thinking about data ownership. They were just thinking in terms of, oh, I could just do this and now I can get all this information about my website. That's pretty interesting. Right, exactly. And sometimes you also have this notion that I could collect all this data. I'm not sure whether I'm going to use it, but maybe I should keep it because I want to figure out how I'm going to use it. And so like you mentioned, I may never be interested in knowing Priya visited the website.

(23:39):

I may be only interested in aggregate numbers, but I don't know what I want. The decision to collect doesn't quite correlate with the decision to use. So the idea is let's collect as much as we want now because we haven't made decisions on what we are going to use. And so when you start with a usage, you may realise that you have collected, and this is actual statistics that I'm giving you, which is about 80% of the data that people collect, they don't use or they dunno how to use, or even if they know how to use it, they don't trust that data because it's either outdated or it's partial or whatever. So they end up using about 20%, but they don't have insights into the 20% they use. So they make decisions that are very broad because it makes more sense, it's safer. So privacy was never a consideration. And it has taken all these regulation, a lot of awareness to start thinking. I think most of us have dual roles, and I'm saying this also when I'm a customer, when I'm being tracked, I don't like it, but when I am an analytics person, I just worry about what if I need this information and I somehow made the wrong decision. So I don't want to be the decision maker. So in some ways it takes 15 years of going a certain path needs to be, you have to unwind and now think differently. It takes time.

Adriaan van Rossum (25:21):

Yeah. And it takes a lot of courage as well because you will probably make a few mistakes along the way, right? Oh, you think this will answer my question and then later you realise this didn't answer my question, so then you'll miss some information. But I think it's important to get out of this mindset of indeed what you're saying, let's collect a hundred percent and then see what we need because that's not a viable solution anymore. It takes time to set also within yourself. But I think, yeah, we're getting there.

Priya Keshav (25:58):

Well, thank you so much for your time, Adriaan. And of course, we need a lot of solutions. So most of the time, I mean as privacy professionals, when I talk to customers and we're sort of thinking about alternatives, when you don't understand the alternatives, it's much more difficult to figure out a path forward. It just feels like there's so many changes, but I don't know what the new normal should look like. And so in some ways, having more privacy friendly technologies also provides you alternatives to think about and where in the spectrum somebody wants to select whether the most friendly one, like you said, in the green zone or something in the grey zone, that would be their choice to make in their journey. But at least being aware and knowing there are choices is a step forward.

Adriaan van Rossum (26:58):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there's more and more choices popping up, right? It's also market. So yeah. That's great. Yeah.

Priya Keshav (27:06):

Thank you so much.

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