Dear Internet Friend,
Listen, I’m a privacy advocate. But not when it’s a marketer just wanting to optimize ad dollars by showing me ads or selling me products I WANT instead of junk I don’t.
We use cookies on our web site in order to know what page you enter my site on, what page you exit on, how long you stay here, what browser you used and also to track who referred you to our site.
That’s what cookies do. Nearly everything else you hear about them is b.s. and hysteria. They are extremely small text files that give marketers basic information make your web surfing experience better.
I use Human Click/Live Person which allows us to chat with customers real time and gives us the above basic stats. It tells me what ip address people are on, city, state, urls, time on site. This is all info a marketer NEEDS to know to better serve their customers.
On a lot of my sites I have Google Analytics on them. This again tells time on site, url’s visited, sometimes actions.
I try to track as many actions on a site as I can like links clicked, opt ins, etc.
We share info with 3rd parties like Live Person, Google Analytics, and so forth. We’re always testing different programs that track different stuff. I use Adtrackz and budurl to track clicks on links, actions and sales.
Also, we take credit card orders on our site. We maintain databases with your order information in secure areas.
I use a plugin called Pixel Caffeine that allows me to set a Facebook pixel if you click on a certain page. This is so that I can show you ads related to the interest when you log into Facebook. You’re going to see ads anyway because that’s how Facebook makes the service free. Wouldn’t you rather at least see an ad you’re interested in vs. something random?
You’re probably right to be concerned about privacy. I ain’t the one you should be worried about though. The programs we use are innocuous and made to help us serve you products you WANT to buy. And to help us buy ads that work, so we are here tomorrow to serve you.
Everything I do is pretty much extremely common and standard. We serve you ads on Facebook. We get stats on our site so we can improve the customer experience. We track ip’s using Wordfence so we can block bots and people trying to screw with our site. We track page load times so we can keep our site fast as possible.