There are two website analytics components in the WE Data Tools product suite which gather information about website visitors and track their behavior.
The first is Google Analytics, a popular website analytics engine. The specific setup and configuration of Google Analytics is ultimately up to each customer. In cases where Elev8 Web Studio has been asked to deploy it on behalf of a customer, we do so using the default configuration.
- For specific details on what information is captured about website visitors, and how it is stored and used, please see the official Google documentation.
The second analytics component is built on top of Google Analytics. When granted permission to do so, WE Data Tools tracks custom user events and actions using the Google Analytics Events API:
- Clicked job posts, employers, map layers
- The contents of job text searches (i.e. “nurse”) or filters (“Jobs in Amherstburg”).
When a website visitor lands on a web page which contains WE Data Tools content, a pop-up window appears which requests the following information:
- Age Group
- Gender
The user can opt out of age/gender activity tracking from this engine by clicking a prominent “No thanks” button. Their activity is still tracked, but is subsequently associated with Unknown gender and Unknown age group.
Once the user makes their selections (or opts out of age/gender tracking) this selection is set in a browser cookie with a retention period of one (1) year.
Important: We track only the following information with the WE Data Tools Analytics engine:
- Timestamp
- Age Group (or Unknown if declined)
- Gender (or Unknown if declined)
- Activity (i.e. a job text search for “nurse”, or clicking on a particular job post, or filtering job posts for a specific location, or clicking on a map marker on the jobs map)
We do not associate this activity to the user’s IP address, nor do we attach any other information – personally identifying or otherwise – to this data.
The WE Data Tools Analytics module does not make any attempt to identify individual people.
The age group and gender information supplied to the WE Data Tools Analytics module by the visitor is encoded before it is sent to Google Analytics, and is thus not directly accessible to Google’s software without custom extraction and parsing. While it is certainly possible for Google to decode our data structure, doing so would require human interest and intervention. It is highly unlikely that Google can make use of this data in its software.
Note: The WE Data Tools analytics module can be disabled if desired. However, this does not affect the analytics activities of Google Analytics, which can be disabled (or simply not deployed in the first place) separately. However, the WE Data Tools analytics add-on module (which tracks age/gender to activities) presently requires that Google Analytics is present and functional.