I've been thinking of trying to combine self-hosted analytics and adding ad info in the urls of ads so I can track if a user arrived at my site via an ad without divulging that to any third parties.
Has anyone tried something like that? Did it work? Obviously what you give up is retargeting but that may have to go anyhow.
Tracking ads via URL parameters is pretty standard (utm parameters), and self-hosted matomo can be set to run without cookies. This means that some metrics can't be tracked [1]. The most impactful of those is attributing people to a campaign if come via an ad, view your website, but only convert after leaving and coming back some time later.
If you leave cookies enabled everything just works just just as you would expect, with full conversion tracking etc. Some ad services try to optimize ads according to tracking data you send them, which obviously doesn't work if you don't run their tracking code.
Has anyone tried something like that? Did it work? Obviously what you give up is retargeting but that may have to go anyhow.