How HubSpot Adjusted Our Reporting Process After GDPR Changed Its Cookie Consent Laws

This post is part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal mindset in which we learn from experiments conducted by our own HubSpotters.

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is an EU law that protects the personal data of EU users and regulates how companies process and process this data.

GDPR exists since May 2018 and by European Council decision of 1 October 2019Companies – including HubSpot – can only delete cookies if a user has expressly consented to them (ie clicked “Yes” on a cookie banner).

In short, you cannot imply consent if users take no action on the banner and continue surfing the website. Before a website visitor takes action, you can only set “absolutely necessary” cookies – cookies that your website uses, e.g. B. a shopping cart.

After the introduction of the new GDPR judgment, companies have tried to understand how to do it Become GDPR compliant. This process raised further concerns about the impact of the regulation on the overall reporting process.

The HubSpot analytics team was no exception when it came to these concerns. We had to develop innovative solutions that allowed the team to better track user data and provide a more intuitive website experience. while complying with the GDPR.

HubSpot was used before GDPR Google Analytics (GA) for website reports and insights into all HubSpot domains – especially to track various metrics related to page sessions, button clicks, freemium signups, campaigns, A / B tests and more.

On October 26, 2019 in response to GDPRHubSpot has implemented a new and improved cookie banner, with which our websites fully comply with the laws of the GDPR and cookie consent in the EU. This action meant that only then could we collect data about EU users who accessed a HubSpot website expressly Give your consent by clicking “Yes” on the cookie banner.

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The following table shows how HubSpots traffic was affected by GDPR. These calculations are estimates based on how many users visit the HubSpot domains both inside and outside the EU.

How did we calculate this multiplier? Download and copy this Google Sheet to learn more.

How HubSpot adapted our GDPR reporting process

The HubSpot Analytics team decided to use a mix of HubSpot Analytics tools and Google Analytics new GDPR guidelines. Here’s how:

We used HubSpot Analytics HubSpot is GDPR compliant
We used Google Analytics to show all data trends.
We used a multiplier to estimate the traffic that we would inevitably lose and that cannot be tracked in either HubSpot Analytics or Google Analytics.

According to data on user interaction with the cookie policy banner from the HubSpot Google Analytics account, around 31% of users generally accept, 6% reject, and the rest (63%) take no action on the cookie banner. This was an eye opener as we didn’t expect the majority of users not to interact with the cookie policy banner at all.

In response, we had to estimate the loss of these unrecognized users on the HubSpot website. We have calculated an estimate multiplier for this. Here’s how:

We assumed that ours Accept (31%), decline (6%) and no action rates (63%) remain the same in the short term.

We have taken historical data traffic from GDPR / EU countries into account on every Google Analytics HubSpot domain.

With this information, we calculated the traffic loss recovery multiplier (based on users without cookies).

For example, for HubSpot.com we received a multiplier of 1.17:

domain	Users with cookies	Users without cookies	Estimated traffic loss	multiplier
HubSpot.com	83%	17%	15-20%	1.17

How did we calculate this multiplier? Download and copy this Google Sheet to learn more.

For example when reported Traffic to hubspot.com was estimated to be 1,000 after the GDPR implementation in Google Analytics (November 1-30) total Traffic would be 1000 x 1.17 = 1.150.

The method described above has helped us estimate traffic loss and minimize the impact of the GDPR on our reporting. This allowed us to continue using Google Analytics to get better insights and reports.

These simple adjustments to reporting using HubSpot Analytics and the Google Analytics estimate have helped the HubSpot Analytics team get a better idea of our actual website traffic – regardless of whether visitors responded to the cookie banners or not .

We hope these suggested methods can help you and your team customize your reporting and minimize the impact of the GDPR.