Steam to stop using Google Analytics
Steam will stop using Google Analytics going forward, Valve announced.
In a blog post, the firm said Google's "tracking solutions don't align well with [Valve's] approach to customer privacy," adding that it will be working on improving its own solution going forward.
This decision was made in the context of Google's Universal Analytics being sunset in July. The company will be introducing Google Analytics 4 as a replacement, with many companies taking the opportunity to switch to other traffic analysis tools instead.
Steam already provides internal traffic reports, but Valve will be strengthening its offering to include geographic breakdown and "better identification of external sources" among others, the company explained.
A few updates are also planned for Steam's UTM system, which focuses on tracking marketing campaigns, including one-day conversation tracking, device split, increased tracking percentage, new vs returning users, and geographic breakdown.
"All the tools and features that we discuss here are built with player privacy in mind; Steam will continue to not share personally identifiable information," the firm clarified. "This approach to privacy means that some trade-offs have been made along the way that limits how specific some reporting can be.
"In most cases, it simply means that any traffic sources that are below a threshold of volume will get reported as 'other'. We intentionally don't collect or store demographic information about users such as age, gender, or race."
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