3 ms·

I'm honestly curious, are all the analytics tools, which rely on making third party queries, still efficient with extensive use of adblocking these days? If no

by nuccy 6y ago

I'm honestly curious, are all the analytics tools, which rely on making third party queries, still efficient with extensive use of adblocking these days? If not, then logs of webservers are the only 100% reliable place (if available of course), so old-style tools like awstats, Webalizer, etc [1] should have a rise in popularity again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software

elcomet 6y ago
The issue is that people often use free reverse proxies like cloudflare, that do caching, so not all requests reach the original server. In this case, the source of truth is cloudflare's loadbalancer, but you have to pay them to get full analytics.
JackWritesCode 6y ago
Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try Netlify, then you’ll see how unreliable they really are. For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level blocking but Fathom’s custom domain feature has done really well for the majority: https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code
- pkalinowski 6y ago
  Good adblockers do DNS lookup to see if subdomain points to tracking server anyway. Only completely self-hosted (your domain, your tracking server) solutions are resilient to adblocking
  - JackWritesCode 6y ago
    For now
  - Carpetsmoker 6y ago
    You can set up a proxy, which isn't too hard (and operating a proxy is a lot simpler than operating an analytics service)
  - nuccy 6y ago
    Interesting, then as a workaround trackers may create an image with pseudo-random src pointing to pageXXXwebsiteYYYclientZZZ.ad.yoursite.com (yoursite.com is the site which serves the actual content), while asking the owner to point NS record for ad.yoursite.com to IP of their DNS server. So HTTP/S request or DNS request can reach them anyway. Obviously DNS caching will prevent them from knowing how many times this particular page was accessed by this particular client, but at least they will know that it was accessed at least once.

by nuccy 6y ago

elcomet 6y ago

The issue is that people often use free reverse proxies like cloudflare, that do caching, so not all requests reach the original server. In this case, the source of truth is cloudflare's loadbalancer, but you have to pay them to get full analytics.

JackWritesCode 6y ago

Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try Netlify, then you’ll see how unreliable they really are. For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level blocking but Fathom’s custom domain feature has done really well for the majority: https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code

pkalinowski 6y ago
Good adblockers do DNS lookup to see if subdomain points to tracking server anyway. Only completely self-hosted (your domain, your tracking server) solutions are resilient to adblocking
- JackWritesCode 6y ago
  For now
- Carpetsmoker 6y ago
  You can set up a proxy, which isn't too hard (and operating a proxy is a lot simpler than operating an analytics service)
- nuccy 6y ago
  Interesting, then as a workaround trackers may create an image with pseudo-random src pointing to pageXXXwebsiteYYYclientZZZ.ad.yoursite.com (yoursite.com is the site which serves the actual content), while asking the owner to point NS record for ad.yoursite.com to IP of their DNS server. So HTTP/S request or DNS request can reach them anyway. Obviously DNS caching will prevent them from knowing how many times this particular page was accessed by this particular client, but at least they will know that it was accessed at least once.