Installation of Google Analytics on DAOhaus App and Website

Warcamp (DAOhaus Core Contributors)
#1

Ask: Install Google Analytics on DAOhaus Website & App

This proposal proposes the installation of Google Analytics on DAOhaus App and Website, so that the Magesmiths and Rangers can have more insights and data to build better products and reach out to more users.

Web analytics is important for DAOhaus to better track and understand our users, how they are using our product & how we can better grow. These insights can help us better look at product development, community and marketing.

Currently, DAOhaus uses Plausible Analytics, a privacy-first web analytics software. This decision was made after surveying a few analytics platforms (e.g. Matomo, Fathom, etc.). You can refer to our Plausible analyics dashboard for our app here and for our website here.

While Plausible gives us basic visibility for tracking web behaviour and usage, there are some limitations.

  1. We cannot do detailed analyses to find actionable insights (e.g. user journey flows + specific queries and filters based on certain referral sources or pages, etc.)
  2. SEO is a big growth channel & search still dominated by Google. Using Google Analytics leads to a more seamless connection and better data analysis with Google Search Console.

Addressing concerns with Google Analytics

Previously, when this topic was raised in the Rangers’ Circle, there were some concerns about privacy & Google’s business model. In response to these points, this is what I have found after my research:

  1. Google plays an important role in any product’s growth (case in point: many leading crypto projects use it)
    Google search has the lion’s share of all web searches, making Google tools such as Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Search Console essential for any product trying to grow and achieve their mission. For instance, the website code for Arbitrum, Uniswap, Sushiswap, Gnosis shows the usage of Google Analytics & other tools.

  2. We can mitigate the risk by turning off features such as “Remarketing” on Google Analytics, preventing Google from using the data to re-market to our users

  3. It is a fair trade-off to achieve our mission of bettering human coordination for now. If Google Analytics can help us better understand, build and market our product to more users, I think this is a fair trade-off for now. Furthermore, there are mitigating factors (see above point) which can tilt the trade-off further in our favor. When there are better privacy-preserving analytics tools, we can make the switch then.

Closing Comments

This proposal calls for the installation of Google Analytics (the best web analytics tool we have right now), so that we can better understand our users, build product and market our product to more users.

While there are some privacy concerns, we can mitigate risk by turning off “Remarketing” on Google Analytics. When better privacy-preserving tools are available, we can switch over to these tools.

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#2

Realistically, how important do we think SEO is going to be for our user acquisition funnel? Our product space is so complex I have trouble imagining that search engine discovery is going to be a primary driver of growth. Is there evidence in DAO and crypto space that SEO would help us reach our target audience?

IMO, the more compelling case is understanding user behavior. In that case, are there analytics that offer better granularity of flows without immediately funneling data into the Google panopticon?

Beyond the specific concern of retargeting, giving our user data to Google means that all that data will be subject to state surveillance if things get dire enough, or we get big enough, that a state actor begins paying attention to DAOhaus. I’m not sure this is a high probability concern, but it is something we should consider as we discuss.

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#3

For the record, I don’t oppose this proposal - but I wanted to raise these questions because I thought they’re salient.

#4

Today, Google is currently the top referral source to daohaus.club (& more than 10x of the next external referral source, i.e. Twitter). I was surprised by this fact because we have done nothing to optimize our SEO.

To investigate why this is the case (i.e. what are people searching? who is searching? why are they searching? How can we update our website / docs with more of these info?), I would have to use Google Search Console + Google Analytics to better understand this.

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It is hard to comment whether SEO will continue as our main source of growth. However, from today’s data and Search being the top of funnel, I think it is an important channel to look into.

I also agree that understanding user behaviour is the more compelling use case. Previously we have compared between privacy-preserving analytics tools such as Plausible, Matomo, Fathom analytics. We ended up using Plausible analytics (see dashboard for our app here and for our website here.

So far, the granularity of flows and user behaviour is still lacking as compared to Google Analytics.

I agree that this is a concern and also strongly believe in privacy too. Unfortunately, the risk of state surveillance on users (myself included) is beyond DAOhaus, since other major DeFi, L1, bridge websites using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. This is definitely a bigger problem that the entire Web3 community should look at.

Specifically for DAOhaus’ product, everything (i.e. addresses, ENS domains tied to Ceramic ID, membership, shares/loot, proposals voted, share of treasury) is public and accessible on the DAOhaus app / Subgraphs. It is unlikely that DAOhaus users use DAOhaus for privacy and it seems to me that installing Google Analytics does not violate any social contract or promises made to users per se.

Curious if I’m making sense here. Would love to hear any other views

More executionally, if we install Google Analytics, we have the option to:

  1. Reduce Google’s data retention time period to 14 months (minimum)
  2. Turn off Google Analytics and switch to other alternatives when they are better
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