I’m pretty principled. I block as much tracking as I can in my personal use of the web because what I do isn’t anyone’s business but my own. So, the idea that I have to put trackers on my site is pretty noxious to me, and I have thus far refused.
This isn’t an ad and I don’t want my personal account associated with my business, so no URLs, but I would like to know what you all think: is this something worthwhile that people will appreciate, or am I letting my principles guide me off a cliff because nobody cares that much?
As much as I appreciate your honesty in this, I only think you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot. Your website is a tool that serves a purpose: to let people find your business and turn them into customers. And in order to know how useful this tool is, you want to have some insights in how much people visit the website, how long they are browsing each page, what pages are read more than others, and so on. Also, you want to know where people come from in your website: do they come from search engines (with what keywords?), or are they clicking through from your social channels? Once you know, you can optimize your marketing materials (including social posts, website content) for your actual target audience.
In stead of not using tracking at all, I would suggest to use anonymized tracking. This gives you enough information to measure effectiveness, without compromising the individual’s privacy. European GDPR requires this, so all tracking tools should have GDPR-compliant options. Also, if you inform your users that you use anonymized tracking, you can show that you’re doing the best you can to protect their privacy as well. Last but not least, (almost) every single site on the World Wide Web tracks their users anyway, so they will likely have been tracked multiple times anyway on their path to your website.