Apart from protecting their privacy, I just don’t see how tracking individuals is going to dramatically help you optimise your website or its marketing. After all, you still have all the referrer details.

Megan: Great input. Sounds like you are well on your way to building a unified web measurement platform.

It took a lot of convincing to get us where we are, and we have miles to go. In my opinion, the more a company diversifies how it collects and actions data (we have web analytics, partner (ad) analytics, doubleclick and others for marketing, affiliate tracking, and transactional data to name a few), the more work you are creating for yourself with your resources in the wrong places.

Our company is finally looking to use our analytics first party cookie and its unique identifier to start linking all our data sets together. In my opinion, web analytics is the glue to all online company analytics – there isnt anything web-based you can track via another vendor that you cant also track in analytics if you put the effort into it.

At least that is true of our business which is a strictly online business with no brick and mortars.

I realize this is a bit off topic so I apologize, I just wanted to answer Brians question.

Rather, I will use GA campaign parameters to link to individual email accounts to track “hot” customers and see who is responsive. Linking that data to very general demographic information would be amazing, but that’s where I find myself approaching the fuzzy line of privacy invasion. That’s where I want the customer to volunteer data, not me extract it without their knowledge.

Back to my original point, privacy isn’t a black and white issue, in my opinion. Certain elements of data can and should be tracked.