In the good ol' days, you might have heard me say innocent words like "Let's track the shit out of our customer journey!" It actually was meant as a commitment to excellence in understanding what our users like to do and what not. These days even thinking about analytics might leave a bad taste in our mouths. Data protection laws on one side and manipulative social media platform practices on the other side have given a good analytics setup a bad rep. Let's adopt a good tracking setup that doesn't make us feel icky in our own startups.

Let's get an overview of:

• Obtaining user consent for tracking
• Managing analytics pixels in one place
• Choosing suitable pixels for the job
• Making sure tracking really works
• Building actionable analytics reports

In terms of tools, we will look at (including alternatives):

• Borlabs Cookie for Consent
• Google Tag Manager for tag management
• Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, and Google Ads Conversion Tags
• Ghostery, Google Tag Assistant, and Facebook Pixel Helper
• Google Analytics, Sheets, and Data Studio for reports

This sinless analytics setup will give us a clear view of who is doing what for how much. It will automatically provide feedback to our paid ads platforms like Instagram and Google Ads on which audiences and ads optimize our campaigns.