Effects of Anonymizing IP Addresses?

[Allie_Williams]

Our company will be expanding into Germany later this year, and we need to modify how we use Google Analytics to comply with Germany's privacy laws.

One option is to anonymize the IP addresses of our users. It looks like the only effect is that some of the Geo reports will become less accurate, but would love to hear from those who have done it. I've read through the Google Analytics forums on the topic, and the info there is sparse.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has experience with this, and if you did it, what were the effects on your GA reporting or any other tools or technologies used on your site? Is this a non-issue, or are there pitfalls we need to consider?

Thanks!

[RyanPurkey]

That's interesting!  It makes me wonder how the law on anonymizing German IPs is effective at providing them with privacy if you're being told the original data is kept intact. On the page you linked to it seems to contradict that saying, "The full IP address is never written to disk in this case." Thanks for the follow-up and additional insights!

[Allie_Williams]

Hi there - wanted to follow up with additional information about this matter.

High Level: It looks like anonymizing IP addresses may be a non-issue.

I read through the Google Analytics product forums, and read one thread where someone was having trouble with their eCommerce tracking after adding the anonymize IP code. We have an AdWords account, so I contacted AdWords Support and asked them if it would affect our eCommerce tracking and also if/how it would affect our geolocation reporting.

Their response: "...anonymization does not affect the Analytics data in any way. The anonymization in this case happens after our tracking is done, thus keeping the original data intact: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en"

I also asked if there was any way to set filters to anonymize IP addresses for users in a specific country (e.g., Germany), and they said there is not: "...currently the only way to anonymize IPs in our system is either by their Geo location (which means excluding all data on German users) or by putting in individual IPs in the system (which will be an impossible task, looking at the large group you are trying to anonymize. Unfortunately there's not other way to do this in our system currently."

While there are several mentions that anonymizing IP addresses will affect geolocation reporting, I haven't found any solid examples of exactly what data is lost/inaccurate.

Bonus: A colleague pointed me to this interesting article about how you can use Google Tag Manager to exclude some traffic from getting passed into Google Analytics at all, including passing IP address information: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2014/03/11/goodbye-to-exclude-filters-google-analytics/

For sites with a lot of traffic that are hitting GA's sampling limits, using GTM in this way can also help reduce the data set passed into GA, thus giving you more of the data you care about before hitting the sampling ceilings.

I haven't tried this yet myself, but thought it might be helpful if others are contemplating these issues.

[RyanPurkey]

I've only come at it form the angle of having a few separate domains per country in EMEA: France, Germany and the UK , so a regional change only affected the one site and not the better known dot com.   It'd be hard to consider without knowing if the change would affect everything on the dot com as well or if there were some way to parse just by German based users.

[katemorris]

I have not had to deal with this myself and I see where you are having an issue understanding how much data you'll lose. I'll hunt some more and what I can find. I am hoping some others can jump in here and let us know what they have seen.

[RyanPurkey]

I see.  So here's what an IP identifies when it's not anonymized: ISP (Network Domain and Service Provider in GA) and router Location (This will vary, but it could cover any and all location fields depending how it's set up, so: City, Metro, Country, Subcontinent, etc.)

Google uses cookies for tracking things like sessions while a whole slew of information is available from the browser... go to https://panopticlick.eff.org to get an idea.  I'm still unsure about whether or not you'd have to change anything when selling from out of country.  Either your products are being shipped in and going through customs then, or German customers are interacting with local German retailers. If it's just one person that has said you do need to do the changes you're considering, I'd contact a couple of other sources to get second, third, and fourth opinions.

[Allie_Williams]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for your response. The company is not planning to physically move servers into the country, but we plan to sell products to Germans via our own website and through German retail outlets. I believe the products sold to German customers will be shipped from a distribution center located within Germany, but I'm not certain about that detail.

We plan to use a subfolder structure for the German content (http://example.com/de/) vs. a TLD (http://example.de), in part because we want to consolidate incoming links to one TLD.

One thing that is unclear is what are the downsides to anonymizing IP addresses? I've read we'll lose some geographic information about users, but I haven't seen specifics on exactly what will be lost. City-level data? Metro-level?

Thanks again!

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Allie. Is the company physically moving servers, domains, and other business aspects into Germany when you expand there?  If that's the case, I'd set them up with complaint tracking on a TLD .de domain and leave other aspects of the site alone to not cause issues with your standard tracking.  You could also put in a Facebook style warning, "This link is sending you away form..." to the effect of saying, "You're leaving the German version of our site..." to even further emphasize the difference between the two.  Further, creating a new site on a de TLD wil not require you to delete or change your other site's Analytics Data. In other words, on the new site you could set up a new instance of whatever type of analytics you decide to use to be perfectly compliant with German laws.

Personally, I haven't had this experience although I do have clients that have done business in Germany off of their US based sites and didn't change anything as far as GA goes. But again it was German based customers ordering and shipping from outside of Germany to Germany where customs, Duty, VAT, etc were the laws at play.

One example, that looks like covers the same ground that looks like you've already covered, but might be useful: http://www.seventen.de/2012/02/google-analytics-and-german-laws-about-data-privacy/  Best of luck!