Can a business be marketed without invading people’s privacy?
That was the question I had in-mind when I started reading up on marketing in our digital age. It seemed that all the options I could find would end up going against my company’s pro-privacy values. Google Ads for example are quite notorious for not just being annoying, but also doing significant cross-site tracking. This is why many privacy advocates including those at Privacy Guides consider an adblocker to be an essential tool for privacy. Trying to find an alternative, I ended up devising an experiment.
The Experiment
For the period of January 13th 2026 to February 13th 2026, I set up a few different marketing avenues to test their effectiveness in privacy-friendly advertising. The goal? To get as many people going to the very website you’re reading this on as possible, in the hopes they might sign up for our website and tech support services if they are interested. To measure this, I used Umami Analytics, which is open source and privacy-respecting.
The first of these was through direct advertising on a forum. Not many forums offer direct advertising, instead using some existing ad network like Google’s offering, but the SomethingAwful forums did have direct banner ads as an option. I put together a banner ad and sent it off to be displayed there to users.
The other method I decided to try was using social media. Instead of using some fancy but fairly manipulative techniques that are often touted in books and articles I’ve read on the subject, I went with simply setting up a company account on Bluesky and just posting whatever seemed relevant, such as letting people know about our services or posting whenever a new blog post was released.
The Results
Ultimately, the results I got are an incomplete picture since Umami is blocked by adblockers, so the only results I have are from those who didn’t have an adblocker. That being said, during the experiment period, the Personal Tech Help website received:
- 89 unique visitors
- 116 page views
- 95% of visitors from SomethingAwful
- 3% of visitors from Google search results
- 2% of visitors from Bluesky
My theory is that the overwhelming majority of visitors to this website who came from Bluesky had an adblocker. This would explain the lack of data regarding them, as it certainly seems strange for only about 2 people from Bluesky to have gone to our site.
Conclusion
To answer the question at the start of this article, it absolutely is possible to market your business without invading people’s privacy! However, I suspect that if I had been willing to forgo any pretense of being a privacy-respecting company, I could have gotten way more visitors, and thus potentially more clients through those avenues. What will I do going forward? At least for the forseeable future, I will continue to advertise on Bluesky, and perhaps look into more avenues to market my business with privacy in mind.