How an ecommerce giant replaced Google Analytics for privacy

A major U.S.-based eCommerce retailer, facing challenges with Google Analytics, developed its own privacy-first, real-time analytics platform to address scalability, data freshness, and legal compliance issues. Despite being a large entity with significant daily web traffic, the limitations of Google Analytics, such as data latency and incompleteness due to ad-blockers and cookie consent, prompted the retailer to create a first-party tracker. This tracker utilizes Kafka for event streaming and Tinybird for real-time analytics, allowing them to capture 100% of traffic and ensure GDPR compliance by using first-party cookies and anonymized session IDs. The new system enables the retailer to maintain control over data flow and attribution models, achieve near-instantaneous data freshness, and adaptively respond to real-time customer demands, especially during peak periods like Black Friday. With this bespoke solution, the company not only addresses privacy and data accuracy concerns but also discovers new operational use cases, positioning itself to proactively meet future analytical needs.