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For me, the problem with GA (or Matomo or any JS analytics) is that it’s not accurate with the people visiting your website. You lose all the ones with a block

For me, the problem with GA (or Matomo or any JS analytics) is that it’s not accurate with the people visiting your website. You lose all the ones with a blocker, all the ones with JS turned of. Of course it’s not the biggest percentage, but still. So you’re right, it depends of what the website is. It’s easier to follow individuals with a JS solution.

zo1 7y ago
This is the sort of thing that the W3C committee and open-source web-companies should be researching/solving instead of "HTTPS" and "SSL pinning", "new HTML5 tags", "web notification", "location apis", and "DNS over HTTPS" type of stuff (although they are important on some level). We shouldn't have to rely on JS in order to do these sorts of website analytics. It could arguably be part of the browser stack and within the users' realm of control. Instead we now have disable GA or all JS in order to not be tracked. GA is a huge privacy issue, and I have no idea why no one is looking at this more closely than some of the other things I see as trivial. Google controls most of the web's search. It controls a huge chunk of the browser market. And a huge chunk of the websites out there use GA if not google-ads. Between Google and Facebook, we are constantly being tracked and monitored for maximum benefit/profit. Case in point: Even without GA, I recently browsed a blog that had a Disqus comments section embedded on it. The embedded Disqus script did a post to "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/iframe" https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/iframe" that had a referral header telling google exactly the page I was at, and it included a few other potentially-tracking tokens. Bad? You decide. But this is not what we should be allowing the players on the web to do, and we shouldn't feel like conspiracy-theorists for being bothered by it.
tyingq 7y ago
GA does support using Google Tag Manager and a NOSCRIPT iframe for recording visits from people with JavaScript disabled. You can also either proxy GA through your own domain, or use server side APIs to track those with blockers. Both support passing the browser IP as a parameter. Also, fwiw, just noting both are technically possible. I'm not speaking to whether either is okay ethically.
- joshyi 7y ago
  I think a big problem with Google Analytics is accuracy, especially with the now so popular adblockers. Log analysis such as GoAccess should be able to track these down fine since it works at the server level. I believe tracking visitors at the client level deflates the actual number of visitors. On the other hand, server-side tracking gives you a more accurate number at the cost of not knowing for sure if the client is a human behind a browser.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    You can programmatically send hits to GA from your server, and get the benefit of the nice UI.
- adamzochowski 7y ago
  FYI: Paranoid adblockers / privacy protectors will block iframe to remote domains. For example: uMatrix by gorhill (same author as uBlock Origin) does this.

zo1 7y ago

This is the sort of thing that the W3C committee and open-source web-companies should be researching/solving instead of "HTTPS" and "SSL pinning", "new HTML5 tags", "web notification", "location apis", and "DNS over HTTPS" type of stuff (although they are important on some level). We shouldn't have to rely on JS in order to do these sorts of website analytics. It could arguably be part of the browser stack and within the users' realm of control. Instead we now have disable GA or all JS in order to not be tracked. GA is a huge privacy issue, and I have no idea why no one is looking at this more closely than some of the other things I see as trivial. Google controls most of the web's search. It controls a huge chunk of the browser market. And a huge chunk of the websites out there use GA if not google-ads. Between Google and Facebook, we are constantly being tracked and monitored for maximum benefit/profit. Case in point: Even without GA, I recently browsed a blog that had a Disqus comments section embedded on it. The embedded Disqus script did a post to "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/iframe" https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/iframe" that had a referral header telling google exactly the page I was at, and it included a few other potentially-tracking tokens. Bad? You decide. But this is not what we should be allowing the players on the web to do, and we shouldn't feel like conspiracy-theorists for being bothered by it.

tyingq 7y ago

GA does support using Google Tag Manager and a NOSCRIPT iframe for recording visits from people with JavaScript disabled. You can also either proxy GA through your own domain, or use server side APIs to track those with blockers. Both support passing the browser IP as a parameter. Also, fwiw, just noting both are technically possible. I'm not speaking to whether either is okay ethically.

joshyi 7y ago
I think a big problem with Google Analytics is accuracy, especially with the now so popular adblockers. Log analysis such as GoAccess should be able to track these down fine since it works at the server level. I believe tracking visitors at the client level deflates the actual number of visitors. On the other hand, server-side tracking gives you a more accurate number at the cost of not knowing for sure if the client is a human behind a browser.
- tyingq 7y ago
  You can programmatically send hits to GA from your server, and get the benefit of the nice UI.
adamzochowski 7y ago
FYI: Paranoid adblockers / privacy protectors will block iframe to remote domains. For example: uMatrix by gorhill (same author as uBlock Origin) does this.