Feature: A page that sets all analytics cookies at once to exclude FOLA volunteers from analytics

[fancyham]

The need

Usefulness: 4/5 (5 is most impactful)
Why: because volunteer’s usage data is confounding our usage analyses

Requires a dev and (a researcher or PM)

We use various analytics packages on our site to help us improve it, but we need a way to exclude FOLA volunteers usage from that data, because our own use of the site messes up the data we collect.

What to build

A single page or javascript that sets all of our ‘exclude me’ analytics cookies:

• Google Analytics
• Microsoft Clarity
• Our own cookie to exclude or tag our behavior for exclusion

These cookies should either exclude the user from data collection or tag their collected data for easy exclusion during analysis.

How is it now?

Right now FOLA volunteer’s visiting pages, often repeatedly while debugging, messes up our page visits data.

Proposed new feature

• 1. A single page that sets long-lasting cookies and confirms that they’re set visually to the user. Optional: Buttons to delete those cookies manually.

This page should be available from a hidden link on the FOLA public site, perhaps small text on the FOLA log-in screen.

All FOLA volunteers would be required to visit this during onboarding.

• 2. A javascript snippet that does the same thing, silently.

This javascript snippet should be run automatically for anyone visiting the dev sites or who enter via the log-in screen on the public site, because by definition, anyone visiting those are FO volunteers

• 3. Make sure that our analytics packages are only collecting data from the public site.

• 4. Nice to have: Some visual indicator for FOLA volunteers that they need to set their cookies again… not sure how this would work.

Sketch

Discussion

What are some other possible solutions?

What are some challenges?