New Survey Report Highlights Increased Impact of GDPR on Marketers

Visitor Analytics conducted a survey of 300+ marketers to hear their views on GDPR, with concerns around legacy software, sourcing new tech, and knowledge gaps.

Visitor Analytics, a privacy-first web analytics company, has conducted a survey of more than 300 marketers and business owners to assess their views on the impact of GDPR. The survey forms part of an initiative to provide better GDPR resources for such professionals, as the impact on their day-to-day operations continues to grow.

GDPR and other similar data privacy policies have, for a long time, presented challenges to marketing departments. Some of these are clear in all our day-to-day lives – the invasive cookie consent banner, for example – while others relate more to the back-end processing and storage of personal data.

The latter of these two issues is what has been dominating the conversation of late, with the Schrems II decision regarding the non-compliance of Google Analytics causing a mild panic in marketing teams across the continent (and beyond).

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So, what does this mean for marketers?

The first clear conclusion from Visitor Analytics’ survey is that it leads to increased concern and uncertainty.

While only half of those surveyed claim that GDPR already affects their day-to-day work, more than two-thirds (70%) believe that the impact it has on them has the potential to increase over time – with half believing this to be a certainty.

When it comes to the types of challenges, two main connected issues stood out, with the complexity of sourcing compliant tech solutions (19%) and the potential of fines related to legacy software (17%) both being in the top four concerns of respondents.

So, it’s very much a case of “out with the old, in with the new”, with 75% of respondents saying that GDPR is a consideration when selecting new martech, with more than a third (38%) saying it’s a constant part of such processes.

This has even led to the development of a website – european-alternatives.eu – dedicated to the promotion of EU-based tech solutions.

“I started European Alternatives to show that there are good alternatives to the big US tech companies and because it bothered me that they are so hard to find,” explained the website’s founder, Constantin Graf.

“Especially in times of GDPR and major concerns about data transfer between the EU and US, many people are quite rightly looking for European alternatives and I wanted to help them,” Mr Graf continued.

Other issues highlighted in the study relate to retargeting (19%), the requirement of opting in (17%), and cookie banners (14%).

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Addressing the Key Concerns

Despite the fact that 71% of those surveyed felt that they were doing a good-to-excellent job at protecting user data, close to half (42%) suggested that they only know “some things” about GDPR, with 29% saying they know very little. Worryingly, 19% said that they knew nothing at all.

“This clear knowledge gap is concrete evidence of the requirement for better and more digestible GDPR resources for marketers,” claims Matt Sarson, Visitor Analytics’ Chief Marketing Officer.

“Beyond this educational push, there is also real value to be derived from increased collaboration and alignment between marketing leaders and dedicated Data Protection Officers (DPOs) – or consultancies – to manage the related tech transformation,” he adds.

The Survey Report forms part of the company’s monthly drive to bring more education around the issue of GDPR for marketers and small business owners, with a range of resources being made available in a designated GDPR hub on their website.
About Visitor Analytics

Visitor Analytics is a privacy-first website analytics SaaS company, with offices in Munich, Germany, and Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The platform, which provides a compliance-driven alternative to Google Analytics, has already been installed on more than two million websites across 190 countries and boasts a wide range of other GDPR/CCPA compliant features – such as heatmaps, live session recordings, and automatic event tracking. A roadmap, which includes, UTM campaign management, SEO, and social statistics, will continue the platform’s mission of becoming the all-in-one toolkit for compliant online marketing data. Because there’s a right way to get to know your customers.

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