Stop spying on me! Why tracking website visitors is creepy and weird
Here’s one for all you freelancers and small business owners out there. Do you care if your competitors look at your website?
If so, have you ever dreamed about a snoopy software package that would tell you EXACTLY who those competitors are, when they looked, and for how long?
Well, dream no longer! Website-visitor-tracking software is alive and kicking, and it’s probably coming soon, to an ears-wide-shut, aggressively salesy company near you.
An unhealthy obsession?
This LinkedIn post caught my eye recently:
Anyone else slightly unnerved by the apparent obsession with tracking “competitors (sic) visitor history”?
It’s a futile obsession at that, because unless they actually tell you, you won’t know why someone chose to visit your website, or why they stayed on it.
(If you’re old like me, you might remember 1471, a landline-telephone service that gave you the number of the last person who called. At first everyone thought this was great, but then they realised you only got the ‘what’ and not the ‘why’, and one is useless without the other).
You could also save yourself a whole lot of guesswork and bother, and talk to your competitors. I do this quite a lot; it’s an opportunity to learn, and there’s often a warm feeling of solidarity. You’re doing the same thing, so you can vent every so often, and maybe refer people who aren’t the right fit for you, to them.
But if you’d rather go all Rear Window on them instead, that’s totally your call.
We’re all just “hot engaged prospects” to them
“We help you track website visitors!” crows the site featured in that LinkedIn post (whose name I have blurred for ironic privacy reasons) with uncontained ‘rub-your-hands-together’ glee. Because if you know “who’s been looking”, you can then contact those “hot engaged prospects” and get lots and lots of lovely business from them.
Presumably, these people won’t be severely creeped out by the fact that you called them straight after they:
- clicked on your website by mistake,
- laughed at your terrible eye for colour and design,
- forgot to close the website tab after a casual browse,
- just wanted an answer to a simple question.
I’m annoyed enough that when I visit most websites, I have to run the gauntlet of ‘Sign up for our newsletter!’ pop-ups before I can check if the site even has what I need.
Now I’ve got to worry about being tagged as a “hot engaged prospect” as well?
Give me strength.
“Caught you peeking!”
I received an email with this heading recently. It was from an online shop with a sale running. The tale is boring and age-old: I’d been looking at the different bargains on offer, but decided not to buy anything.
It was a weird message from out of the blue; a cheery half-admonishment from a company I didn’t really know and wasn’t expecting to hear from, because I hadn’t given them my email address. It’s like someone you once said a polite “hello” to at a party suddenly pitching up in your garden and declaring that you’re their BFF.
So I deleted the email, sent all future communications from them straight to Junk, then cleared all the cookies on my browser for good measure.
(Isn’t that what most people do when they get shuddery messages like that? Or is it really just me?)
Is website-visitor-tracking legal?
You might think it wouldn’t be, but the area is a bit like the sky in October… depressingly grey.
When I asked, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) directed me to this part of their website about consent. It also recommended that I ask companies what their “lawful basis” is for tracking and using my information.
You can do the same, if you feel like it.
Or you could click on these creepy companies’ websites a few times, maybe staying on them for a few hours while you work on something else. Encourage all your friends to do the same.
Then, when they call or email you later on, you can waste their time for a few silly moments. How long can you string them along for?
Make a game of it. Create a leader-board. Award prizes.
Whatever you prefer.
