Also, what would you use to monitor user behavior to improve your product if third party tracking is frowned upon?
* user testing, user interviews
* (there's probably a fancy word for this) generate usage metrics from production data. If the product is e.g. a To Do app, you could measure "engagement" by counting how many To Do items each user has created
* first-party tracking – analyze access logs, self-hosted analytics
> The proposed solution you mention would include plenty of folks who don’t convert.
The one bit of data I currently have going from the app to corpweb analytics is precisely this - associating a conversion with a website user. That conversion info is sent with hand-coded triggers, the relevant third-party libraries are self-hosted (a good thing generally), and code doesn't call out to it when the user is outside of the billing/subscription flow.
> Also, what would you use to monitor user behavior to improve your product if third party tracking is frowned upon?
I'm open to A/B-testing stuff - the important part in my mind is less specifically about third-party tracking, and more about ensuring that the product/engineering team makes decisions about the product. Pulling third-party code of any kind, but especially tracking code, is a process full of footguns that should be under the control of people who know what they're doing and are empowered to say "no".
I would still be very cautious about giving analytics code full access to all user activity.
If you turn on demographic information in GA that explicitly also allows the data from your instance to be shared with Google’s advertising products.