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Ask HN: How to measure performance compromises of adtech/tracking scripts?

by pentagrama·1y ago·1 comments·view on hn ↗

I'm working as a UX designer/Project lead on a website, and the marketing/ads/traffic team keeps asking me to load the site with scripts. I've tried raising concerns about user privacy, but they haven't given it much weight. So, I'm considering tackling it from a performance angle instead, things like site speed and SEO impact. Maybe I'll have better luck with that approach.

Does anyone know of any resources or tools to compare how much weight, CPU usage, or other performance overhead these scripts cause?

So far, I've had to implement Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, Marfeel, and "Facebook Pixel" with more likely coming my way. Any advice would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

1 comments

Would a performance impact be persuasive?

Ultimately they are trying to use that data to answer "when we do x the business makes y dollars". The data they get is pretty granular, and shows the users behavior across multiple platforms making it very hard/impossible to replicate inhouse.

So, the trade off seems to be performance (privacy, lower bounce rate, possibly better ranking) vs insight into how your product is being used and what some of the other things your users are interested in.

Making a convincing argument to go without for some perf is going to be a really hard sell. Especially if those people have new laptops and fast internet. I think if you are going to go this route you need to yoke that idea to the money. "Saving x resources lowers our cloud bill by y%" or "Our product would be a good fit for people in this country, but they tend to have slow mobile internet, increasing our performance will unlock that market".

One compromise could be using 'aggregator pixels'. Effectively you add a single tracking script to your site, and they forward that data to all the different analytics companies your colleagues want to use. Metarouter is one that comes to mind (no affiliation).