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With the surge in Ad Blocking recently, part of me wonders how accurate the Google Analytics JavaScript tracker is today, and how accurate it will be in 5 years

With the surge in Ad Blocking recently, part of me wonders how accurate the Google Analytics JavaScript tracker is today, and how accurate it will be in 5 years. I wonder if we'll see a trend back to server-side analytics soon.

coderdude 10y ago
The percentage of visitors with an ad blocker depends on your site's audience. Outside of computer geeks and gamers, almost no one uses ad blockers. I wouldn't buy into the hype that the whole world is installing ad blockers.
- f4rker 10y ago
  This is correct. The vast vast majority of people are not using adblock.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - RussianCow 10y ago
    Do you have a source for this? Your statement doesn't carry any weight if you can't back it up. Anecdotally, I have seen a rise in non-tech-savvy people using ad blockers, but I'd be interested to see some hard data.
  - achairapart 10y ago
    Sometime ago I read an interesting interview[1] with the Economist deputy editor, Tom Standange, saying things like: > The other thing about ads is that 41 percent of millennials are using ad block. My daughter has ad block and she goes around infecting every machine she gets to. She puts it on everything. > But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads. Digital privacy is an undeniable rising trend. Just stating the vast majority of people are not using adblock is, at minimum, shortsighted. [1]: http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage-on-digital-strategy-and-the-limits-of-a-model-based-on-advertising/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage...
    - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
      > She’s a total nightmare for advertisers Poor things, back to not knowing which 50% of the budget they're wasting, like it's the XX century. The horror.
    - ionised 10y ago
      > But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads. Seems like she has the right idea to be honest.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  Is there any data on the number of people using ad blockers? I've personally seen a massive increase in the number of non-techy friends using them. A lot of people for example stream sports (illegally) and those sites are barely functional without a blocker.
  - coderdude 10y ago
    I don't have those numbers. I know there have been some publications lately that suggest there is an increase, which make sense since I doubt the number would decrease, but like browser usage stats, those numbers are heavily dependent on the audience they were collected from. My non-technical friends have never mentioned ads to me before in the context of the web. I doubt that means they appreciate ads on sites but I don't think it occurs to them that they need to find a way to remove them. I think they appreciate that Hulu lets you pay to remove them, or that Netflix doesn't have ads, but I never hear "this website sucks because of ads." They just assume it's the way of things.
- krrrh 10y ago
  It is significant: https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/ https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/
  - coderdude 10y ago
    Reading a couple of slides in, this report applies to Asia-Pacific demographics.
    - Nagyman 10y ago
      It provides global statistics too.
- lsagar 10y ago
  Actually, number of people using ad-blockers has more than doubled between 2015 and 2016 according to the PageFair report [1]. [1] https://pagefair.com/blog/2016/mobile-adblocking-report/ https://pagefair.com/blog/2016/mobile-adblocking-report/
  - coderdude 10y ago
    "More than doubled" doesn't mean much if it's 0.0000001% to 0.0000002%. It certainly wouldn't refute what I said.
    - lsagar 10y ago
      You are right, but the number of ad-block users is significant now -- around 20% (accd. to the same PageFair report). I have also personally seen around 30% users use ad-blockers, for a site with around 100,000 visitors a day. However, most of the audience for that site is people in twenties, so it's not surprising to see higher than average ad-blocker usage.
- endorphone 10y ago
  Reports are from 20-30% of desktop and mobile users make use of some sort of adblocker/privacy tool. That is a very large set of users, and in some industries and domains the numbers go much higher. Purely for self-protection/anti-aggravation I absolutely recommend it to every casual user I advise.
  - coderdude 10y ago
    I don't believe that figure at all for the general populace.
    - true_religion 10y ago
      It's 50 percent on my work site and we are general entertainment for the 20 to 35 year old demographic.
    - michaelmrose 10y ago
      Why not. Try sharing a link to ublock origin on facebook with text to the effect that installing the add on from the link will remove 90% of the annoying clutter from the web, make everything load faster, and protect their computers from malware. Realize that the link in either the chrome or firefox case will be to the official addon site and in the mind of the user safe doubly so since it came from someone trusted. What percentage of people who see it will spend the 3 clicks to install it? * Note I know you have no incentive to actually do so its hypothetical many people are encouraging non techies to do so and have been doing so for a very long time the percentage that are aware of adblocking is increasing.
    - hluska 10y ago
      Do you have any sort of citation or is this just opinion? If you have evidence, please share.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  I encourage friends and family to install ad blockers. I've been asked numerous times over the years to look at a computer that has either died or just isn't working well anymore. I always offer to install an adblocker after the actual problem is addressed and about everyone leaves with an adblocker. Its not technically difficult at all. It takes a few clicks to install and one click to disable on the minority of sites that don't work with ad blockers. I highly doubt I'm entirely atypical.
- peterhartree 10y ago
  We're seeing 30-50% of visitors blocking Google Analytics client side tracking at 80000hours.org. Target audience is university educated 18-30 year olds, ~100K unique visitors / month. The folks at Segment.io warn their users to expect ~20%, with the caveat that blocking rates vary wildly between demographics [1]. [1] https://community.segment.com/t/1889n1/how-common-is-client-side-tracker-blocking-how-can-i-find-the-percentage-of-visitors-that-block-google-analytics-on-my-website#x189c0 https://community.segment.com/t/1889n1/how-common-is-client-...
fictioncircle 10y ago
Tbh, Google Analytics samples at scale and people who are blocking like that aren't affecting the results much as a result. Well, unless they have truly "unique" patterns of using the UI specific to that demographic.
Klathmon 10y ago
Honestly, I prefer the Google Analytics setup. People who block my tracking scripts don't want to be tracked, so I won't track them. I use that info to see how people use a product, how they interact with it and what I can do to improve it. Where my time and money will be best spent. If people want to block them, that's fine, I'm not going to try and get around them, but their "voice" is also muted here. I'm no longer factoring in their usage patterns, their usage at all.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I think the question is: Do you know what percentage of your visitors that applies to? I don't disagree with your mindset at all, but could you be missing out on a large percentage of users and now know about it?
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    I very well could, but I'm not going to find out. All it takes is one blogger somewhere to see that I collect stats like "70% of my visitors block tracking" and then the smear pieces start with wonderful headlines like "X tracks users that explicitly disabled tracking" and I lose a significant portion of my user base. I've had it happen before, i'm not going to make the same mistake again. It's kind of a hamfisted approach, but if you block tracking, i'm going to treat you like you don't exist. It's not that i'm trying to punish anyone, it's just that the analytics seems to be the ONLY reliable source of getting any kind of information about what people use. Surveys only reach an extremely small subset, or nobody at all (i've had them get a 0% response rate while there were tens of thousands of daily users), unsolicited feedback is almost 100% negative and a large percentage of it nonsensical (things like "I hate the new update"... What am I supposed to do with that?), requests for feedback on new features or changes might get a few good responses, but I have no way of comparing those responses with actual usage (especially when one gets linked on reddit and suddenly gets 10X the number of responses simply because it was linked on reddit). And then if you decide to go against what your 3 responses to a problem requested, you'll get more blog posts like "x asks for feedback, does whatever they want anyway". I'm sorry, but I'm done with that. I go by usage numbers and patterns only now.
grey-area 10y ago
On technical sites I'm seeing traffic cut at least in half by GA against traffic measured server side (excluding bots), which isn't too surprising. On others by maybe a third. It is probably gradually becoming more and more inaccurate as users install blockers. I doubt many GA users are aware of this though. Anyone else seeing this?
- rhizome 10y ago
  I wonder if anybody's done a mashup to compare/correlate GA figures with server-side ones from logs.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Does every adblocker block ga by default? Ublock sure does but few years ago adblock (plus?) did not.
spuiszis 10y ago
I think JavaScript analytics is more or less here to stay. A broader move to server-side analytics depends on what you're going to use the data for. When I want clean(er) data for important metrics, like revenue/conversion rate for eCommerce sites, I implement a hybrid JS/back-end solution where I send important data to the GA API or Mixpanel via some back-end service [1]. I've found that revenue data in GA compared to the database on a number of sites I have consulted for can be off quite a bit, and sometimes +/- 25%, depending on how the JavaScript has been implemented. With larger businesses, you'll probably see more server-side implementations as they have the budgets to ensure the data they're collecting is accurate. For a blogger or a small publisher without a dedicated tech team, there's nothing easier than dropping in a script tag and watching the data roll in. [1]https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/ https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
GrinningFool 10y ago
> see a trend back to server-side analytics soon. We can only hope.
pierrefar 10y ago
I run a service called Blockmetry [0] that measures exactly that, directly from pageviews. Some numbers get published regularly [1]. The percentage from August (last public number) is 5.2% of non-bot JS-enabled pageviews did not fire the analytics tag. The short answer is that it's significant on an aggregate level worldwide, but the reality is that it varies _massively_ by country, device, day of the week [2], and even different sections on the same site. Additionally, there is small percentage of pageviews that have JS disabled you have to account for. This analysis was on HN earlier today [4] saying 0.2% of pageview worldwide have JS disabled, but, again, with huge variation (notably, Tor, but elsewhere too). Q4 numbers are not released yet, but the trend is generally up, with some notable drops. Get in touch if you want more info or to set it up on your site [5]. [0] https://blockmetry.com/ https://blockmetry.com/ [1] https://blockmetry.com/weather https://blockmetry.com/weather [2] https://blockmetry.com/blog/weekday https://blockmetry.com/blog/weekday [4] https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled [5] https://blockmetry.com/contact https://blockmetry.com/contact

coderdude 10y ago

The percentage of visitors with an ad blocker depends on your site's audience. Outside of computer geeks and gamers, almost no one uses ad blockers. I wouldn't buy into the hype that the whole world is installing ad blockers.

f4rker 10y ago
This is correct. The vast vast majority of people are not using adblock.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- RussianCow 10y ago
  Do you have a source for this? Your statement doesn't carry any weight if you can't back it up. Anecdotally, I have seen a rise in non-tech-savvy people using ad blockers, but I'd be interested to see some hard data.
- achairapart 10y ago
  Sometime ago I read an interesting interview[1] with the Economist deputy editor, Tom Standange, saying things like: > The other thing about ads is that 41 percent of millennials are using ad block. My daughter has ad block and she goes around infecting every machine she gets to. She puts it on everything. > But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads. Digital privacy is an undeniable rising trend. Just stating the vast majority of people are not using adblock is, at minimum, shortsighted. [1]: http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage-on-digital-strategy-and-the-limits-of-a-model-based-on-advertising/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage...
  - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
    > She’s a total nightmare for advertisers Poor things, back to not knowing which 50% of the budget they're wasting, like it's the XX century. The horror.
  - ionised 10y ago
    > But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads. Seems like she has the right idea to be honest.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
Is there any data on the number of people using ad blockers? I've personally seen a massive increase in the number of non-techy friends using them. A lot of people for example stream sports (illegally) and those sites are barely functional without a blocker.
- coderdude 10y ago
  I don't have those numbers. I know there have been some publications lately that suggest there is an increase, which make sense since I doubt the number would decrease, but like browser usage stats, those numbers are heavily dependent on the audience they were collected from. My non-technical friends have never mentioned ads to me before in the context of the web. I doubt that means they appreciate ads on sites but I don't think it occurs to them that they need to find a way to remove them. I think they appreciate that Hulu lets you pay to remove them, or that Netflix doesn't have ads, but I never hear "this website sucks because of ads." They just assume it's the way of things.
krrrh 10y ago
It is significant: https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/ https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/
- coderdude 10y ago
  Reading a couple of slides in, this report applies to Asia-Pacific demographics.
  - Nagyman 10y ago
    It provides global statistics too.
lsagar 10y ago
Actually, number of people using ad-blockers has more than doubled between 2015 and 2016 according to the PageFair report [1]. [1] https://pagefair.com/blog/2016/mobile-adblocking-report/ https://pagefair.com/blog/2016/mobile-adblocking-report/
- coderdude 10y ago
  "More than doubled" doesn't mean much if it's 0.0000001% to 0.0000002%. It certainly wouldn't refute what I said.
  - lsagar 10y ago
    You are right, but the number of ad-block users is significant now -- around 20% (accd. to the same PageFair report). I have also personally seen around 30% users use ad-blockers, for a site with around 100,000 visitors a day. However, most of the audience for that site is people in twenties, so it's not surprising to see higher than average ad-blocker usage.
endorphone 10y ago
Reports are from 20-30% of desktop and mobile users make use of some sort of adblocker/privacy tool. That is a very large set of users, and in some industries and domains the numbers go much higher. Purely for self-protection/anti-aggravation I absolutely recommend it to every casual user I advise.
- coderdude 10y ago
  I don't believe that figure at all for the general populace.
  - true_religion 10y ago
    It's 50 percent on my work site and we are general entertainment for the 20 to 35 year old demographic.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    Why not. Try sharing a link to ublock origin on facebook with text to the effect that installing the add on from the link will remove 90% of the annoying clutter from the web, make everything load faster, and protect their computers from malware. Realize that the link in either the chrome or firefox case will be to the official addon site and in the mind of the user safe doubly so since it came from someone trusted. What percentage of people who see it will spend the 3 clicks to install it? * Note I know you have no incentive to actually do so its hypothetical many people are encouraging non techies to do so and have been doing so for a very long time the percentage that are aware of adblocking is increasing.
  - hluska 10y ago
    Do you have any sort of citation or is this just opinion? If you have evidence, please share.
michaelmrose 10y ago
I encourage friends and family to install ad blockers. I've been asked numerous times over the years to look at a computer that has either died or just isn't working well anymore. I always offer to install an adblocker after the actual problem is addressed and about everyone leaves with an adblocker. Its not technically difficult at all. It takes a few clicks to install and one click to disable on the minority of sites that don't work with ad blockers. I highly doubt I'm entirely atypical.
peterhartree 10y ago
We're seeing 30-50% of visitors blocking Google Analytics client side tracking at 80000hours.org. Target audience is university educated 18-30 year olds, ~100K unique visitors / month. The folks at Segment.io warn their users to expect ~20%, with the caveat that blocking rates vary wildly between demographics [1]. [1] https://community.segment.com/t/1889n1/how-common-is-client-side-tracker-blocking-how-can-i-find-the-percentage-of-visitors-that-block-google-analytics-on-my-website#x189c0 https://community.segment.com/t/1889n1/how-common-is-client-...

fictioncircle 10y ago

Tbh, Google Analytics samples at scale and people who are blocking like that aren't affecting the results much as a result. Well, unless they have truly "unique" patterns of using the UI specific to that demographic.

Klathmon 10y ago

Honestly, I prefer the Google Analytics setup. People who block my tracking scripts don't want to be tracked, so I won't track them. I use that info to see how people use a product, how they interact with it and what I can do to improve it. Where my time and money will be best spent. If people want to block them, that's fine, I'm not going to try and get around them, but their "voice" is also muted here. I'm no longer factoring in their usage patterns, their usage at all.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I think the question is: Do you know what percentage of your visitors that applies to? I don't disagree with your mindset at all, but could you be missing out on a large percentage of users and now know about it?
- Klathmon 10y ago
  I very well could, but I'm not going to find out. All it takes is one blogger somewhere to see that I collect stats like "70% of my visitors block tracking" and then the smear pieces start with wonderful headlines like "X tracks users that explicitly disabled tracking" and I lose a significant portion of my user base. I've had it happen before, i'm not going to make the same mistake again. It's kind of a hamfisted approach, but if you block tracking, i'm going to treat you like you don't exist. It's not that i'm trying to punish anyone, it's just that the analytics seems to be the ONLY reliable source of getting any kind of information about what people use. Surveys only reach an extremely small subset, or nobody at all (i've had them get a 0% response rate while there were tens of thousands of daily users), unsolicited feedback is almost 100% negative and a large percentage of it nonsensical (things like "I hate the new update"... What am I supposed to do with that?), requests for feedback on new features or changes might get a few good responses, but I have no way of comparing those responses with actual usage (especially when one gets linked on reddit and suddenly gets 10X the number of responses simply because it was linked on reddit). And then if you decide to go against what your 3 responses to a problem requested, you'll get more blog posts like "x asks for feedback, does whatever they want anyway". I'm sorry, but I'm done with that. I go by usage numbers and patterns only now.

grey-area 10y ago

On technical sites I'm seeing traffic cut at least in half by GA against traffic measured server side (excluding bots), which isn't too surprising. On others by maybe a third. It is probably gradually becoming more and more inaccurate as users install blockers. I doubt many GA users are aware of this though. Anyone else seeing this?

rhizome 10y ago
I wonder if anybody's done a mashup to compare/correlate GA figures with server-side ones from logs.
angry-hacker 10y ago
Does every adblocker block ga by default? Ublock sure does but few years ago adblock (plus?) did not.

spuiszis 10y ago

I think JavaScript analytics is more or less here to stay. A broader move to server-side analytics depends on what you're going to use the data for. When I want clean(er) data for important metrics, like revenue/conversion rate for eCommerce sites, I implement a hybrid JS/back-end solution where I send important data to the GA API or Mixpanel via some back-end service [1]. I've found that revenue data in GA compared to the database on a number of sites I have consulted for can be off quite a bit, and sometimes +/- 25%, depending on how the JavaScript has been implemented. With larger businesses, you'll probably see more server-side implementations as they have the budgets to ensure the data they're collecting is accurate. For a blogger or a small publisher without a dedicated tech team, there's nothing easier than dropping in a script tag and watching the data roll in. [1]https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/ https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

GrinningFool 10y ago

> see a trend back to server-side analytics soon. We can only hope.

pierrefar 10y ago

I run a service called Blockmetry [0] that measures exactly that, directly from pageviews. Some numbers get published regularly [1]. The percentage from August (last public number) is 5.2% of non-bot JS-enabled pageviews did not fire the analytics tag. The short answer is that it's significant on an aggregate level worldwide, but the reality is that it varies _massively_ by country, device, day of the week [2], and even different sections on the same site. Additionally, there is small percentage of pageviews that have JS disabled you have to account for. This analysis was on HN earlier today [4] saying 0.2% of pageview worldwide have JS disabled, but, again, with huge variation (notably, Tor, but elsewhere too). Q4 numbers are not released yet, but the trend is generally up, with some notable drops. Get in touch if you want more info or to set it up on your site [5]. [0] https://blockmetry.com/ https://blockmetry.com/ [1] https://blockmetry.com/weather https://blockmetry.com/weather [2] https://blockmetry.com/blog/weekday https://blockmetry.com/blog/weekday [4] https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled [5] https://blockmetry.com/contact https://blockmetry.com/contact