For our September events we welcomed sponsor Piwik PRO to Columbus for not one but two events!

On Wednesday evening we had Jason Packer of Quantable Analytics talking about tracking methods, and Piotr Słonina of Piwik PRO talking about how their product fuses different kinds of tracking methods together in reporting.  Piotr and Marcin Pluskota flew all the way to Columbus from Wrocław, Poland for the event! We’d like to apologize for their flight delays and inform them that a multi-hour delay in Atlanta is, in fact, a rite of passage.

Due to an unforeseen scheduling snafu we had our first “al atrio” presentation in the atrium of Rev1 rather than in our typical room location, but we made it work. Jason and Piotr pitched a double-header of a presentation that covered things like:

• • How can we track anonymized users in a privacy-respectful way, even if those users decline cookies?
    Our answer – by not “tracking” those users in a way that lasts beyond a short period of time, or in ways that could clearly identify a particular user. Jason felt this should probably all be done with cookies, but the regulations around cookies have caused many vendors to look for work-arounds. Some of those work-arounds are more privacy-respectful than others.
  • Where is the line between a session hash (like IP + User-Agent) and browser fingerprinting?
    Our answer – it’s not a distinct line, but tools that use invasive methods and provide durable fingerprints are on the wrong side of it, at least when used for tracking.
  • How do tools like GA4 and Piwik PRO handle these different types of users: logged-in, cookied, and non-cookied?
    Our answer – GA4’s default blended user identity has a tiered hierarchy of user id, cookies, and modeling based upon “cookieless pings”. Piwik PRO has a more flexible solution that uses session hashes and allows individual sites to choose their own adventure when it comes to dealing with the so-called “consent gap”.

Jason’s Slides:

Piotr’s Slides

For those looking to learn even more, we also hosted a follow-up seminar on Thursday. This was the first official Piwik PRO meetup in the US, and we were were proud to have done that in Columbus! Some of the highlights from Thursday included:

• A deeper discussion of the Piwik PRO suite including Tag Manager, CMP, and CDP.
• Discussion of Piwik PRO’s migration away from their freemium model. Pricing now starts at $40/mo, more pricing info here.
• A sneak preview of how Piwik PRO will be integrating the Fraud0 anti-bot system into their platform.
• Delicious food from Brassica, and a very restrained amount of griping about GA4 from the audience.

Still hungry for even more Piwik PRO? Check out the upcoming Piwik PRO day on October 21, a virtual event featuring speakers such as Simo Ahava, Brian Clifton, Steen Rasmussen, as well as CBUSDAW veterans Matt Gershoff and Josh Silverbauer!

Some pics from both events: