Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

Hmm would be curious to know which block lists you have.

I'm only blocking 27 things with most of them being Split.io (for A/B testing I presume) Sprig, Stripe and Sentry.

Those aren't really third-party trackers (even though I am blocking most of them) in the marketing sense..

There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify(??), which make sense to block but don't feel that intrusive if they're tracking inbound referrals.

I don't even see 50 other things that I could be blocking.

Not arguing the point here, just wondering what I'm missing since I try to keep pretty extensive block lists myself.

View on HN

> There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify

This is completely inexcusable from a fintech company. It shows me, as a potential customer, that they're not serious - either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.

Yeah this is on the public inbound signup pages, not in the app itself (although I can't confirm that it's not in the app - I didn't sign up).

This is pretty standard stuff, and while I'm not a fan of trackers and I personally block them, I don't resent companies that want to understand their traffic and prospects.

As a business you want to know which paid channels are working and where your traffic is coming from.

A question for you then, if this is "completely inexcusable": How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?

> How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?

There are several ways:

  - Have a specific URL for each entry into the sales funnel - you see this on YouTube with things like "go to blahblahblah.com/witty-tag to sign up and get my discount"

  - Look at the referrer URL if you don't want separate incoming links per entry

  - Ask for a referral code when someone is creating their account - this allows you to track entry from people referred into the product

  - Have a field on the signup page where you ask this question instead of invading the user's privacy to get it

There are many ways that don't involve sticking a ton of trackers on a signup page, a page that by definition, all of your users must go through at least once and part of the face of your company. To me, it's not a good look that these trackers are there and invasive.

> A question for you then, if this is "completely inexcusable": How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?

By simply asking users how and where they found out about a service? Sure there is a possibility that some users might not respond truthfully (or at all), but I believe that the quality of data collected in this (respectful) way still trumps that of data snitched from unsuspecting users but skewed by those who use adblockers (not unlikely in the case of a fintech service because of expected higher user awareness of privacy concerns).

So you're going to intercept and ask every single user who lands on your inbound signup page before you let them sign up?

That doesn't feel like a great user experience. As a user, I would just button past that pop-up or form.

The goal with these kinds of analytics is not to get referral information from only users who sign up, but for anyone who lands on the page - maybe just to read about you at first - so you have a sense of where they came from and how your marketing spend is doing.

Most paid traffic doesn't convert. If you want to know how much of it is converting, you need to also know how much didn't convert.

Referrer header? Or don't these services pass a query param when they send a user in? Why do you need to call back into their js?

This is a good point. But it would mean more work on the Monarch side (and possibly more support for the analytics team when their customer messes up etc).

I would bet that the JS is an implementation shortcut, and a way for the analytics service to avoid doing customer-side implementation support. Keep things as simple as possible (which is a reasonable business goal).

Plus it means that the service you're using can refactor or change around how they handle things and you don't need to be updating your code all the time?

But the tradeoff is that you end up in this situation where people ask "why do you need to load a JS file from a third party?"

Tracking behaviour on a marketing homepage is a bit different than tracking in the app. It's probably just conversion pixels for ad networks (ie, you need to determine if advertising on tiktok actually works). Not sure if you need to install JS from their specific networks, probably not. But generally I'm not against the idea if it's restricted to marketing sites.

>> either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.

This is my fear for any finapp I try now, as I was on Mint, and now left. At what point will Monarch be acquired and/or begin to sell me things I don't want to increase profits?

> begin to sell me things I don't want to increase profits?

What financial service, new or old, doesn't do this already?

90% of the communication from my bank is them trying to push additional services on me. It's never about what's good for me, it's what's good for them.

My count might include additional elements from going through signup flow with their bank connection providers.

My lists are:

  - uBlock
  - EasyList
  - EasyPrivacy
  - Online Malicious URL Blocklist
  - Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list
  - uBlock filters – Annoyances
  - AdGuard Annoyances filter
  - pl: Oficjalne Polskie Filtry

> There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify

Yeah, if my bank started embedding those on their account page, I would GTFO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com