Oct 28 Do Not Track Legislation

Do Not Track Legislation

Been reading the news again. Apparently there’s some proposed legislation on the horizon that could potentially change the online marketing game dramatically. Note the emphasis on the “could”. You might remember a few years back when congress finally stood up to telemarketers that called right around the time you were sitting down for dinner. You remember those guys, right? Well you might also remember the the National Do Not Call List that many of us added ourselves to, making it illegal for anyone to call you for advertising purposes.

Well now congress is in the process of hammering out a bill that will create a national “do not track” list that will allow Americans to add themselves to the list and make it illegal for those added to the list to be tracked by software like Google Analytics. I talked about Google Anayltics and how great a tool it is for online marketers previously. It allows you to know where someone who came to your site is from, home many pages they visited, how long they spent on your site, what keyword phrase they searched to find your site and it gives tons of other information about your search traffic that I can’t list here in full.

If someone decided to opt out of being tracked and added themselves to the “do not track list” tracking programs would not be able to get any information about that visitor to your site. If you can’t collect information on your visitors and what they’re doing on your site and how they got there then it makes it impossible to do the routine optimization that good sites need to stay good. You would have no idea what people like and what they don’t. It would put us back in the dinosaur era of the yellow pages where all of your marketing efforts are hit or miss and there’s no way to tell what’s working.

But there’s good news. From what I’ve been reading it seems that even if this legislation passes most people won’t go through the trouble of adding themselves to the list. Why is this you might ask? Because most Americans are not that concerned about being tracked on the internet. At least they’re not as concerned about being tracked on the internet as they are about being called by a telemarketer.

The whole dynamic is different. Being solicited by a person over the phone is something that is physical in the real world that you have to deal with and it’s annoying. Having a tracking program put a cookie on your computer to see what you are doing a website is something intangible that you don’t have to deal with and it doesn’t really affect you. So I think the only people that are going to add themselves to this list are those hyper concerned about online privacy, because tracking programs do many things but they can’t and don’t take any personal information about the people they’re tracking on a site. So, all in all this legislation is not going to affect online marketers and SEOs in any significant way.

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