Using Ghostery for SEO success

A free browser plugin can give you a lot of help in your SEO campaign

Why is Ghostery useful?

The Ghostery plugin (available for most browsers) is built to protect your privacy when visiting the web. It does this by controlling which analyitcs or ad scripts get executed in your browser.

Why would we, digital marketers, want to use this? Don’t we want to track people who visit our website- how can we then prevent ourselves from being tracked? Isn’t that hypocritical?

Here’s why I’m recommending this to you- as a marketer:

1. Ghostery prevents your website visits from inflating your clients’ analytics data. Do you have a big project where you have to change every page on a client’s website? Well, don’t make them think they had a “big traffic day” just because of all the work you did! Don’t make their conversion rate look bad by all your traffic (as you work on their website) inflates the numbers but doesn’t produce leads.
2. Ghostery helps you identify all the analytics being used on a website. This can help you identify marketing tactics that you didn’t know they were using (“hey, I noticed you have the Facebook pixel on your website- are you doing Facebook Ads?”). It can help you see if there are other analytics packages being run- so you can have more data (“Hey, I noticed you’re running Microsoft Clarity. That’s awesome! Can I see that too?”). It can even identify unintentional ad scripts (installed by plugins) or tracking scripts (that the old agency can still look at- even if it’s none of their business).
3. When visiting other websites (while doing a link building campaign, for instance) this will make your experience a little more pleasant rather than being overwhelmed by ads. In addition, as you visit sites for your clients, Ghostery will prevent remarketing pixels from targeting you- as they try to promote things your clients would be interested in.

What should you expect from Ghostery?

Ghostery can cause some unexpected problems, of which you should be aware. For instance, do you know why companies offer font’s for free? They’re using it to track visitors to that website (I guess you should have read the fine print). There are many things like this about which you might not be aware. If a website appears to be “broken” check to see if Ghostery is “causing” the problem by preventing something from executing on the website. In addition, some bank websites might not work (especially after you login) with Ghostery enabled.

The Process

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