17 ms·

13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

187 points by markosaric 6y ago

pachico 6y ago
Only 13%? According to some independent sources, up to 30% (and in some countries 40%) of Europeans use adblockers. If you're interested, I can try to find out the sources. This is why I use my own tracking system.
- drukenemo 6y ago
  Can you please tell the sources? I would be interested in reading more about this.
  - pachico 6y ago
    I've been trying to find the reports I had at the time but I'm having no luck. In the meanwhile: - https://strikesocial.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-to-block-adblock-detection/ https://strikesocial.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-to... - https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-growth-is-slowing-down-but-not-going-away https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-growth-is-slow...
- smilespray 6y ago
  Ad blocking and tracker blocking sometimes, but clearly not always, overlaps.
- shawabawa3 6y ago
  The most popular ad blocker is AdBlock, which does not block Google ads or analytics by default
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  Is that 30-40% on all platforms or just desktop though? I don't have an ad blocker on my phone, yet use ublock origin on my Macbook + Chrome. I suspect this is pretty common, as it's harder to set up ad blocking for your mobile browser than desktop.
  - iwannahelp 6y ago
    It's actually super easy now, with PiHole if you'd like to self-host or NextDNS if you want something that Just Works.
    - toomanybeersies 6y ago
      I wouldn't describe either of those as "super easy", especially for non-technical people, compared to going to the Chrome Web Store and clicking install on uBlock Origin.
  - badRNG 6y ago
    uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger work on FF for Android
    - rchaud 6y ago
      FF's market share on Android is very small. Chrome is the default browser and does not support any kind of adblocking. Oddly enough, Samsung's built-in browser does support adblock through an extension.
freddyym 6y ago
If only it was a higher percentage...
- tomcooks 6y ago
  Path of least resistance will unfortunately make it lower, once social networks, media groups and browser vendors play the usual dark UI patterns
Simon_says 6y ago
> How I implemented my study > I installed Google Analytics alongside Plausible Analytics on three sites in June. All he measured was people who load Plausible Analytics and not Google Analytics. Anybody running noscript (like me) wouldn't have shown up here at all.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  Yup, would have been interesting to compare both vs a log analytics tool like Matomo.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Even when I run JavaScript (I don’t by default), uBlock Origin blocks https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js through Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list. Not sure if that’s one that’s enabled by default or if it’s one I’ve enabled. So yeah, I would expect the true Google Analytics blockage figure to be markedly higher than the 13% reported here.
  - Akronymus 6y ago
    The peter lowe list is enabled by default.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    It wasn't blocked for me, also with uBlock Origin. I found that it was only added to _Peter Lowe's_ list yesterday/today, so it wouldn't have affected the statistics for this blogpost https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?showintro=1&startdate[day]=12&startdate[month]=07&startdate[year]=2020 https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?showintro=1&st...
    - pgl 6y ago
      Yeah, I added this yesterday. For the record, you can also view exact timestamps on the detail page: https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/details.php?hostname=plausible.io https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/details.php?hostname=plausibl...
onion2k 6y ago
None of my website users need to block Google Analytics.
- karxxm 6y ago
  Mine either. They also don't have to worry about Facebook analyzing click behavior via the SDK.
  - yomly 6y ago
    Sigh - the number of websites which were broken when browsing the internet from China because trackers from Facebook were not wrapped in exception handling and the endpoints were blocked. Literally couldn't give the companies business. /rage
    - throwaways885 6y ago
      Why should any company care about an authoritarian regime blocking facebook.com?
      - pdkl95 6y ago
        Pretending that any resource will always be available is shoddy programming. Check your return values, trap non-fatal exceptions, and always assume remote network resources might not be available. Forget China; there are many reasons an HTTP request to facebook might fail. A website that ignoring errors when fetching a remote resource is bad programming for the same reason ignoring "file not found" errors when calling open() is bad programming.
      - gpm 6y ago
        Maybe they shouldn't. But they probably should care about users blocking Facebook if they are at all ethical. They should probably care about Facebook breaking their site if they care about uptime or might compete against Facebook.
      - yomly 6y ago
Pete-Codes 6y ago
I've used Simple Analytics since day one of my site. Thoroughly recommended for privacy. Fathom Analytics is another option.
- shreyasminocha 6y ago
  OP works on Plausible.io
  - omosubi 6y ago
    This should be the top comment
- petargyurov 6y ago
  I also use Simple Analytics. It's great.
- criddell 6y ago
  What kinds of actionable insights have you gained through analytics? Have you changed your site with the goal of improving those numbers?
cm2187 6y ago
I am not surprised by the low iOS numbers, adblockers are a pain to setup and I haven’t found one as good as ublock origin. Would anyone have recommendation for a good iOS adblocker?
- fuzzy2 6y ago
  You install the blocker and that’s it. I don’t see how it can get any easier than that. At least with Safari, you can officially have ad blocking. :D I use Adguard. It has a customized combination of the blocking lists you know from desktop browsers. Trust doesn’t really matter all that much—the blocker cannot see what you’re doing in the browser.
- drukenemo 6y ago
  Pi-Hole at home, NextDNS on the go. That’s my setup.
- throwayws 6y ago
  1Blocker works fine here. One filter (Ads) is for free.
- jasonlingx 6y ago
  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that iOS has “content blockers” built in. If you google “iOS ad blocker”, AdGuard should be the first result, just install the app and flip a few switches in settings to enable it. I still haven’t actually used ad blockers yet on my other browsers, only iOS Safari.
- evrimfeyyaz 6y ago
  I use Wipr. So far so good.
  - jeffhuys 6y ago
    Wipr here as well, on macOS and iOS. Never have any problems, or ads for that matter.
- michaelt 6y ago
TomGullen 6y ago
Better way perhaps we do is compare Cloudflare visitors to GA visitors over same time frame. This method doesn’t measure people with JS disabled. I think it’s important to remember also with large numbers a percent of users blocking GA is likely not a big deal - you just want something generally accurate. Switching analytics providers to get more data isn’t in itself a reason to switch. If people care about payload size of tracking scripts on their site then I see a good opportunity here for CDNs to offer analytics.
- K0nserv 6y ago
  I haven't found an answer to this elsewhere and I've also asked Cloudflare but it's unclear if Cloudflare's analytics filters known bots in any way which AFAIK GA does.
- markosaric 6y ago
  My idea was to use server logs too but AWStats showed more than 100% higher number of unique visitors and more than 18 times higher number in page views (both compared to Plausible numbers) so I excluded it from the study as I thought it’s very inaccurate.
  - JeanMarcS 6y ago
    As I understand that unique visitor would be higher (awstats, IIRC, considers that after an hour, a same IP is a new visitor), I don't get how you can have that number for page views. I guess it depends on people gowing back to pages and JS is not executed, but logs are updated ? Strange.
    - markosaric 6y ago
      It's strange. My best guess is that despite AWStats filtering bots, many do get through. It was easy to see as most viewed pages according to AWStats were back end pages etc. I tried Webalizer with similar results too. I published the stats difference here: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis
michael-ax 6y ago
says: https://markosaric.com/speed-up-wordpress/ https://markosaric.com/speed-up-wordpress/ >> Steps I took to make my site speedy and green >>> To not add much additional footprint, I’ve decided not to use Google Analytics, .... .. this is too weird for me.
- markosaric 6y ago
  I installed GA for one month only last month in order to check the data. Now it's GA-free again.
  - vntok 6y ago
    This is like reading books with one's reading glasses on for a while, then off for a while, then on again for a while. In Web analytics the medium to long term trend almost always trumps individual data points. Those don't mean a thing and can actually be bad for the business owners if "corrective" actions get taken based upon them.
__alexs 6y ago
Slightly off topic: Plausible claim that their cookieless tracking is GDPR compliant but this seems a bit shaky to me. Unless they are doing something that isn't specified in their docs their fingerprinting seems reversible which would make their user identifiers PII like any session ID you'd store in a cookie. AIUI the GDPR doesn't particularly care about cookies, it cares about you tracking people without their consent. If you have a cookieless way of tracking individual people that is as accurate as cookies then clearly you still need consent?
- abofh 6y ago
  Correct, the rulings to date have generally involved cookies, but it's the act, not the tool.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  GDPR doesn't care about tracking, it's about data processing. How cookies are handled in a compliant manner is handled under something like PECR (in the UK at least). https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/guidance-on-the-use-of-cookies-and-similar-technologies/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/guidance-... If data is being processed without containing PII, then GDPR becomes a non-issue. /edit My bad, because this tool uses cookies it does in fact require consent if it's to be used in a properly GDPR compliant manner.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    It contains IP addresses, which are personally identifiable under the GDPR.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Yes. GDPR is about collection and processing of personal information. How you collect them is not important. HTTP cookies or fingerprinting and successive deanonimization is the same as getting the name and address with a form on paper. You need consent.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  It seems on-topic, since the post is essentially advertising the Plausible.io service. > In summary, here’s how we assign a hash that we use for unique user counting: hash(website_domain + ip_address + user_agent) Would adding a daily salt to this make it compliant? You'd no longer be able to track if someone returns to the website the next day. https://plausible.io/data-policy https://plausible.io/data-policy
jiripospisil 6y ago
> Safari was a big surprise to me. With all the marketing Apple does focused on privacy and with them even highlighting Google Analytics as being blocked, I was expecting numbers closer to Firefox. Safari does not block anything (not even in the upcoming release) - it will still happily load all of the tracking and fingerprinting JS. All it does is prevent some information from being sent back (3rd party cookies, stripped referrer etc.) but the requests are still being made and received code executed.
mahesh_rm 6y ago
Rightfully so. Shameless plug, a few months ago I began working on a privacy conscious UX/UI research and qualitative analytics tool [0] based on open source (MIT) technologies, which aims at offering a self hostable backend. It's in alpha, feel free to reach out if you want to give it a spin. [0] https://www.sessionforward.com https://www.sessionforward.com
- iaml 6y ago
  YSK that cloudflare removed the contact email on your site.
  - mahesh_rm 6y ago
    Thank you, will check! Indeed, website is still in progress. :-) Meanwhile, you can find my personal email in my HN profile!
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Could we establish a convention of adding "(ga'd)", "(pixel'd)" and/or "(GDPR'd)" here on HN, similar to what we do with rehashed stories by putting the year into braces after the title?. While we're at it, maybe we should also use "(paywalled)" because that's a frequent complaint?
- majewsky 6y ago
  You could do an alternative HN frontend that puts badges behind the title.
petargyurov 6y ago
On my website [0] I opted not to use Google Analytics or any other invasive trackers. We use SimpleAnalytics and so far I really like it. Yes, it's "simpler" in that you get less data but honestly, I think people over-value some of the data they get from GA. A lot of it is superflous. [0] https://makely.me https://makely.me
sdwolfz 6y ago
Only 13%? (Just kidding!) Serious question now: how do we get this number to rise to 50%? How about 80% or 95%? I'm been on a quest for a long time now to convince people I know to install ublock origin on their browsers, but it seems to be a hard sell, even among more tech-literate people, the effort to convince them is non trivial. They stick with it after I install it for them, and they use it everywhere themselves after a while, and thank me for it, it's just that getting them to experience it makes them go defensive. What gets them is not improved privacy, nor tracking removal, but no longer having to deal with video ads on YouTube, or those embarrassing naked people or viagra banner ads on websites, like Yahoo mail. So basically privacy is an afterthought, a nice to have consequence, as it's not an immediate visible part of the experience for them.
- shawabawa3 6y ago
  The problem is that people still think of ad blocking as similar to piracy instead of as a security or privacy tool The other problem is that "AdBlock" used to be the standard ad-blocking tool, but now has been taken over by advertisers and allows "non-intrusive" ads, such as google
  - sdwolfz 6y ago
    True, some more daring people go to google and search for "adblock" when I tell then they should install an adblocker, and I have to correct them and pitch "ublock origin", and that's when the defensive stance happens. They ask: "Why? Why not adblock? What's the difference? There's also an ublock without the origin part in the name, why is that, why use the other? it has the same logo..."
- liotier 6y ago
  Do it at the nameserver: OPNsense's Unbound blacklists do most of the job for my whole network - in particular it covers tablets, where ad blockers are a rarer occurrence than on desktop.
salicideblock 6y ago
Seeing that Plausible Analytics is not using cookies and instead hashes fields including IP address - the measure of "unique site visitors" could be a proxy for false uniques by Plausible Analytics. For example, an user visits once via his data connection and once via wifi - Plausible may see different users where Google's cookie will pin it as one user. Another interesting result is the 16% of total page views - I don't think false uniques could changes this. But it will be distorted by correlation of views-per-user with blocking settings.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  I don't see why the focus is on "unique" visitors. To compare to older media, if someone buys two newspapers then they are a double-good customer. Either they are spending so much time reading it themselves that they need two copies (ie reading via two devices/IP addresses) or they are giving that second copy to a friend (two people, one device). So imho page view should be valid regardless of uniqueness (absent bot detection etc).
  - lucideer 6y ago
    This depends on monetization. If you're selling copies of newspapers, 2 purchases by 1 customer = 2 purchases. The number of customers is irrelevant. If you're monetizing via on-page ads or affiliate links (as the author is), revenue is much more likely to correlate to unique visitors than to page views.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      >> revenue is much more likely to correlate to unique visitors That's the bit I don't understand. Why does an advertiser not value a customer seeing an ad twice, or for a longer time? In fact I would say that those customers are much more valuable because their multiple views bookend an extended period of viewing an ad. If I view a website at home in the morning, then again while at work, I have been exposed to that ad for many minutes, as opposed to one-time readers who click away within seconds. That has to be worth something more.
tome 6y ago
Tangentially, is there some webpage you can visit that confirms which means of tracking your browser/extensions are blocking? I have installed Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin and NoScript on Firefox, but I don't know how I can verify that they are doing what I hope they are. EDIT: I suppose there's https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
toastal 6y ago
I'd like to see the spread in statistics of what OS, platform, browser is doing the most blocking and who's most underrepresented. Not wanting to be tracked is very reasonable, but these I would guess are mostly to be your power users anyhow and now you're making decisions around people that may understand your product best.
eden_h 6y ago
Google Analytics has a fair amount of filtering by default - including bots/spiders. Went to Plausible's website, it makes no mention of this type of blocking. That 13% could be eaten into significantly by removing that type of activity. More convincing would be matching up activity across sites, and seeing for what sessions they differ. If this was a decrease in users who had significant sessions (>30 secs, for example), there'd be more meaningful conclusions to draw.
SahAssar 6y ago
And umatrix blocks both Google Analytics and Plausible Analytics since it blocks all third party scripts by default.
aaanotherhnfolk 6y ago
I know this was just written as content marketing, but a more accurate insight wouldn't involve the conversion to uniques at all. On one side you'd have count of unique IPs from the access logs at your web server. And on the other side you'd have count of unique IPs seen by the tracking tools you use. And even then you wouldn't be able to map this quotient to human behavior. But you would have an upper bound on how inaccurate your analytics tools are.
- tatersolid 6y ago
  “Unique IPs” is a terrible metric, and has been for more than a decade. Carrier grade NAT, corporate networks, VPN service users, etc. all will share the same source IPv4 address. In IPv6, the opposite is the case: clients will change their IPs frequently for privacy reasons resulting in an overcount.
donohoe 6y ago
I'd consider this a little on the low, but perhaps that makes sense given nature of the site and potential type of audience. On publisher sites where I've had access to analytics we'd see an Ad-Blocker rate of 8% on the sites with a 'good' ad experience (low programmatic, less crappy positions and UX) but as high as 30% on the crappier ones (saturated with banner ads, had Outbrain/Taboola modules, etc). (That was about 2 years ago so I would have thought that ad-blocking with continue its slow increase)
fomine3 6y ago
I don't care to be tracked but ad blocker automatically also blocks tracker and I have no motivation to unblock tracker manually.
scottoreily 6y ago
Sad violin
superkuh 6y ago
What happened to using your web logs? It requires absolutely no javascript and no third parties and there's no invasion of privacy.
- vntok 6y ago
  It also is completely useless because of the tens of thousands requests random bots and hacking tools do each day on most websites, the many network hops for mobile users, the utterly impossible task of counting time spent per page (on active tab), conversion tracking and so many data that web logs aren't designed to collect or present in any useful way.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    They're actually pretty useful for me despite, and even because of all the things you mention. I don't know why a corporation couldn't achieve the same as my single person plus a bit of perl. I guess for-profit organizations just have unique goals that can't be met unless they're acting unethically.
    - vntok 6y ago
      Being able to reflect on what works and what doesn't is actually the ethical thing to do so that the business' decision makers don't spend time, money and human resources on efforts that are at best useless and at worst detrimental to the company. Employees or (worse) freelancers who deliberately retain data and keep it away from the company are utterly unethical in that they prevent the company to assess their actions and to take adequate measures based on them, including firing them if they cost but don't provide.
      - superkuh 6y ago
        You're assuming anything that saves/time money is ethical because it is beneficial for the company. But many things that are beneficial for a company are unethical and bad for actual humans the corporate "person"/entity interacts with.
idoubtit 6y ago
How many sites break because of Google Analytics being blocked? Do they even realize that their content appears broken? Many sites use JavaScript client-rendering, even for static content. Sometimes, the analytics failure blocks the rendering. I've experimented it recently, with a blank page for a French governmental site (securite routiere) and with a truncated content for an American newspaper (Boston Globe, IIRC). When you send a server-rendered page, you know the content is present, and very probably it renders correctly on the client. Transmission errors are logged by the web server. With a SPA, many factors could break the rendering, and the web server won't hear about it unless hard work is done to collect JS errors.
- macNchz 6y ago
  I think the most common and critical failure mode I’ve seen is when websites wrap click handlers for important conversion events (ie “Complete Purchase” or “Join Mailing List” buttons) in a call to a tracking script. Google Tag Manager has a callback system that makes it really easy to trigger an event and wait for all the tracking pixels to fire before you advance someone to the next page, “guaranteeing” that you capture the events. If GTM is blocked and no effort has been made to handle a case where it didn’t load, however, the Complete Purchase button just straight up won’t work. I debugged this behavior in a high traffic site several years ago and have since noticed it all over the internet. With how widespread ad blockers are these days–especially in some demographics–I’d consider it an important QA step to ensure that customers can actually pay you even if they’re blocking ads and trackers.
jamescridland 6y ago
1. the OP works for Plausible 2. The OP uses a non-standard call to Plausible which probably isn’t in many block lists 3. It’s in mine
- lightswitch05 6y ago
  So, the domain in question is ms.markosaric.com. Which is a CNAME to custom.plausible.io. uBlock Origin is able to block based on CNAMEs, but it is not a default configuration. PiHole V5 blocks based on CNAME as well, and it is actually enabled by default. I run a little blocklist project [1] and I've had custom.plausible.io blocked in my list since April 8th [2]. So, although I didn't have ms.markosaric.com blocked directly in my list, the PiHole still would have blocked it via CNAME blocking. Also uBlock origin if you have CNAME blocking enabled. [1] https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/ https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/ [2] https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts/commit/21fd108ffd29960474a1c47803307c776806fecb https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts/commit/21fd108ffd2996...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - brian_herman__ 6y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/f8qnpc/ublock_origin_1250_with_cname_uncloaking_is_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/f8qnpc/ublock... The latest uBlock Origin blocks CNAMES >= 1.25
  - JeremyNT 6y ago
    > uBlock Origin is able to block based on CNAMEs, but it is not a default configuration. I believe this is the default now, isn't it? [0] [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.25.0 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.25.0
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - 6y ago
ubercow13 6y ago
>But Linux is also the least popular of the operating systems with only 8% of the total laptop/desktop market. That sounds very high, I thought it was still ~1-2%? Shouldn't Firefox block GA by default now since they enabled enhanced tracking protection by default? I'm surprised the number for Firefox is so low.
skeppy 6y ago
That number is wrong. It's greater than 13%. He installed another javascript tracker. So, he didn't catch any of the users that block javascript. Didn't read his whole lengthy post, but not sure why he just didn't use a standard 20-year old log analyzer (like AWStats or similar) to just compare _any_ visit by a single IP address over a set 24-hour period. Forget about page views, A/B tests, metrics, customer journeys, etc... that's what G.A. is designed to be used for (along with its competitors like P.A.). The question is very, very simple - especially for standard websites. How many different IPs requested what volume (in bytes) of resources from your server? We've been measuring that number on the web for nearly 30 years and it requires ZERO installs, scripts, 3rd-party services, etc. None of this would be so bad except that all the alarmists decrying abuse or overuse of G.A. and looking at alternatives are (generally speaking) not anyone that Google cares about. Google's attitude "Uh, go ahead and use a different spyware/tracker/script tool. We don't care about your crummy blog. We are still installed on 499 of the Fortune 500 websites. That's what we care about."
olliej 6y ago
Of course another way to phrase this is “13% of my website visitors are actively blocking my support for google’s privacy invasive tracking”
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
> We run it through a one-way hash function to scramble the raw IP addresses and make them impossible to recover. It is very much possible. The space of IP addresses is about 10^10 so a rainbow table for 256 bytes hashes would be around 1TB large. Adding the target websites would scale the size linearly

187 points by markosaric 6y ago

Only 13%? According to some independent sources, up to 30% (and in some countries 40%) of Europeans use adblockers. If you're interested, I can try to find out the sources. This is why I use my own tracking system.

drukenemo 6y ago
Can you please tell the sources? I would be interested in reading more about this.
- pachico 6y ago
  I've been trying to find the reports I had at the time but I'm having no luck. In the meanwhile: - https://strikesocial.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-to-block-adblock-detection/ https://strikesocial.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-to... - https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-growth-is-slowing-down-but-not-going-away https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-growth-is-slow...
smilespray 6y ago
Ad blocking and tracker blocking sometimes, but clearly not always, overlaps.
shawabawa3 6y ago
The most popular ad blocker is AdBlock, which does not block Google ads or analytics by default
toomanybeersies 6y ago
Is that 30-40% on all platforms or just desktop though? I don't have an ad blocker on my phone, yet use ublock origin on my Macbook + Chrome. I suspect this is pretty common, as it's harder to set up ad blocking for your mobile browser than desktop.
- iwannahelp 6y ago
  It's actually super easy now, with PiHole if you'd like to self-host or NextDNS if you want something that Just Works.
  - toomanybeersies 6y ago
    I wouldn't describe either of those as "super easy", especially for non-technical people, compared to going to the Chrome Web Store and clicking install on uBlock Origin.
- badRNG 6y ago
  uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger work on FF for Android
  - rchaud 6y ago
    FF's market share on Android is very small. Chrome is the default browser and does not support any kind of adblocking. Oddly enough, Samsung's built-in browser does support adblock through an extension.

freddyym 6y ago

If only it was a higher percentage...

tomcooks 6y ago
Path of least resistance will unfortunately make it lower, once social networks, media groups and browser vendors play the usual dark UI patterns

Simon_says 6y ago

> How I implemented my study > I installed Google Analytics alongside Plausible Analytics on three sites in June. All he measured was people who load Plausible Analytics and not Google Analytics. Anybody running noscript (like me) wouldn't have shown up here at all.

iamacyborg 6y ago
Yup, would have been interesting to compare both vs a log analytics tool like Matomo.
chrismorgan 6y ago
Even when I run JavaScript (I don’t by default), uBlock Origin blocks https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js through Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list. Not sure if that’s one that’s enabled by default or if it’s one I’ve enabled. So yeah, I would expect the true Google Analytics blockage figure to be markedly higher than the 13% reported here.
- Akronymus 6y ago
  The peter lowe list is enabled by default.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  It wasn't blocked for me, also with uBlock Origin. I found that it was only added to _Peter Lowe's_ list yesterday/today, so it wouldn't have affected the statistics for this blogpost https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?showintro=1&startdate[day]=12&startdate[month]=07&startdate[year]=2020 https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?showintro=1&st...
  - pgl 6y ago
    Yeah, I added this yesterday. For the record, you can also view exact timestamps on the detail page: https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/details.php?hostname=plausible.io https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/details.php?hostname=plausibl...

onion2k 6y ago

None of my website users need to block Google Analytics.

karxxm 6y ago
Mine either. They also don't have to worry about Facebook analyzing click behavior via the SDK.
- yomly 6y ago
  Sigh - the number of websites which were broken when browsing the internet from China because trackers from Facebook were not wrapped in exception handling and the endpoints were blocked. Literally couldn't give the companies business. /rage
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    Why should any company care about an authoritarian regime blocking facebook.com?
    - pdkl95 6y ago
      Pretending that any resource will always be available is shoddy programming. Check your return values, trap non-fatal exceptions, and always assume remote network resources might not be available. Forget China; there are many reasons an HTTP request to facebook might fail. A website that ignoring errors when fetching a remote resource is bad programming for the same reason ignoring "file not found" errors when calling open() is bad programming.
    - gpm 6y ago
      Maybe they shouldn't. But they probably should care about users blocking Facebook if they are at all ethical. They should probably care about Facebook breaking their site if they care about uptime or might compete against Facebook.
    - yomly 6y ago

Pete-Codes 6y ago

I've used Simple Analytics since day one of my site. Thoroughly recommended for privacy. Fathom Analytics is another option.

shreyasminocha 6y ago
OP works on Plausible.io
- omosubi 6y ago
  This should be the top comment
petargyurov 6y ago
I also use Simple Analytics. It's great.
criddell 6y ago
What kinds of actionable insights have you gained through analytics? Have you changed your site with the goal of improving those numbers?

cm2187 6y ago

I am not surprised by the low iOS numbers, adblockers are a pain to setup and I haven’t found one as good as ublock origin. Would anyone have recommendation for a good iOS adblocker?

fuzzy2 6y ago
You install the blocker and that’s it. I don’t see how it can get any easier than that. At least with Safari, you can officially have ad blocking. :D I use Adguard. It has a customized combination of the blocking lists you know from desktop browsers. Trust doesn’t really matter all that much—the blocker cannot see what you’re doing in the browser.
drukenemo 6y ago
Pi-Hole at home, NextDNS on the go. That’s my setup.
throwayws 6y ago
1Blocker works fine here. One filter (Ads) is for free.
jasonlingx 6y ago
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that iOS has “content blockers” built in. If you google “iOS ad blocker”, AdGuard should be the first result, just install the app and flip a few switches in settings to enable it. I still haven’t actually used ad blockers yet on my other browsers, only iOS Safari.
evrimfeyyaz 6y ago
I use Wipr. So far so good.
- jeffhuys 6y ago
  Wipr here as well, on macOS and iOS. Never have any problems, or ads for that matter.
michaelt 6y ago

TomGullen 6y ago

Better way perhaps we do is compare Cloudflare visitors to GA visitors over same time frame. This method doesn’t measure people with JS disabled. I think it’s important to remember also with large numbers a percent of users blocking GA is likely not a big deal - you just want something generally accurate. Switching analytics providers to get more data isn’t in itself a reason to switch. If people care about payload size of tracking scripts on their site then I see a good opportunity here for CDNs to offer analytics.

K0nserv 6y ago
I haven't found an answer to this elsewhere and I've also asked Cloudflare but it's unclear if Cloudflare's analytics filters known bots in any way which AFAIK GA does.
markosaric 6y ago
My idea was to use server logs too but AWStats showed more than 100% higher number of unique visitors and more than 18 times higher number in page views (both compared to Plausible numbers) so I excluded it from the study as I thought it’s very inaccurate.
- JeanMarcS 6y ago
  As I understand that unique visitor would be higher (awstats, IIRC, considers that after an hour, a same IP is a new visitor), I don't get how you can have that number for page views. I guess it depends on people gowing back to pages and JS is not executed, but logs are updated ? Strange.
  - markosaric 6y ago
    It's strange. My best guess is that despite AWStats filtering bots, many do get through. It was easy to see as most viewed pages according to AWStats were back end pages etc. I tried Webalizer with similar results too. I published the stats difference here: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis

michael-ax 6y ago

says: https://markosaric.com/speed-up-wordpress/ https://markosaric.com/speed-up-wordpress/ >> Steps I took to make my site speedy and green >>> To not add much additional footprint, I’ve decided not to use Google Analytics, .... .. this is too weird for me.

markosaric 6y ago
I installed GA for one month only last month in order to check the data. Now it's GA-free again.
- vntok 6y ago
  This is like reading books with one's reading glasses on for a while, then off for a while, then on again for a while. In Web analytics the medium to long term trend almost always trumps individual data points. Those don't mean a thing and can actually be bad for the business owners if "corrective" actions get taken based upon them.

__alexs 6y ago

Slightly off topic: Plausible claim that their cookieless tracking is GDPR compliant but this seems a bit shaky to me. Unless they are doing something that isn't specified in their docs their fingerprinting seems reversible which would make their user identifiers PII like any session ID you'd store in a cookie. AIUI the GDPR doesn't particularly care about cookies, it cares about you tracking people without their consent. If you have a cookieless way of tracking individual people that is as accurate as cookies then clearly you still need consent?

abofh 6y ago
Correct, the rulings to date have generally involved cookies, but it's the act, not the tool.
iamacyborg 6y ago
GDPR doesn't care about tracking, it's about data processing. How cookies are handled in a compliant manner is handled under something like PECR (in the UK at least). https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/guidance-on-the-use-of-cookies-and-similar-technologies/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/guidance-... If data is being processed without containing PII, then GDPR becomes a non-issue. /edit My bad, because this tool uses cookies it does in fact require consent if it's to be used in a properly GDPR compliant manner.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  It contains IP addresses, which are personally identifiable under the GDPR.
pmontra 6y ago
Yes. GDPR is about collection and processing of personal information. How you collect them is not important. HTTP cookies or fingerprinting and successive deanonimization is the same as getting the name and address with a form on paper. You need consent.
Symbiote 6y ago
It seems on-topic, since the post is essentially advertising the Plausible.io service. > In summary, here’s how we assign a hash that we use for unique user counting: hash(website_domain + ip_address + user_agent) Would adding a daily salt to this make it compliant? You'd no longer be able to track if someone returns to the website the next day. https://plausible.io/data-policy https://plausible.io/data-policy

jiripospisil 6y ago

> Safari was a big surprise to me. With all the marketing Apple does focused on privacy and with them even highlighting Google Analytics as being blocked, I was expecting numbers closer to Firefox. Safari does not block anything (not even in the upcoming release) - it will still happily load all of the tracking and fingerprinting JS. All it does is prevent some information from being sent back (3rd party cookies, stripped referrer etc.) but the requests are still being made and received code executed.

mahesh_rm 6y ago

Rightfully so. Shameless plug, a few months ago I began working on a privacy conscious UX/UI research and qualitative analytics tool [0] based on open source (MIT) technologies, which aims at offering a self hostable backend. It's in alpha, feel free to reach out if you want to give it a spin. [0] https://www.sessionforward.com https://www.sessionforward.com

iaml 6y ago
YSK that cloudflare removed the contact email on your site.
- mahesh_rm 6y ago
  Thank you, will check! Indeed, website is still in progress. :-) Meanwhile, you can find my personal email in my HN profile!

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Could we establish a convention of adding "(ga'd)", "(pixel'd)" and/or "(GDPR'd)" here on HN, similar to what we do with rehashed stories by putting the year into braces after the title?. While we're at it, maybe we should also use "(paywalled)" because that's a frequent complaint?

majewsky 6y ago
You could do an alternative HN frontend that puts badges behind the title.

petargyurov 6y ago

On my website [0] I opted not to use Google Analytics or any other invasive trackers. We use SimpleAnalytics and so far I really like it. Yes, it's "simpler" in that you get less data but honestly, I think people over-value some of the data they get from GA. A lot of it is superflous. [0] https://makely.me https://makely.me

sdwolfz 6y ago

Only 13%? (Just kidding!) Serious question now: how do we get this number to rise to 50%? How about 80% or 95%? I'm been on a quest for a long time now to convince people I know to install ublock origin on their browsers, but it seems to be a hard sell, even among more tech-literate people, the effort to convince them is non trivial. They stick with it after I install it for them, and they use it everywhere themselves after a while, and thank me for it, it's just that getting them to experience it makes them go defensive. What gets them is not improved privacy, nor tracking removal, but no longer having to deal with video ads on YouTube, or those embarrassing naked people or viagra banner ads on websites, like Yahoo mail. So basically privacy is an afterthought, a nice to have consequence, as it's not an immediate visible part of the experience for them.

shawabawa3 6y ago
The problem is that people still think of ad blocking as similar to piracy instead of as a security or privacy tool The other problem is that "AdBlock" used to be the standard ad-blocking tool, but now has been taken over by advertisers and allows "non-intrusive" ads, such as google
- sdwolfz 6y ago
  True, some more daring people go to google and search for "adblock" when I tell then they should install an adblocker, and I have to correct them and pitch "ublock origin", and that's when the defensive stance happens. They ask: "Why? Why not adblock? What's the difference? There's also an ublock without the origin part in the name, why is that, why use the other? it has the same logo..."
liotier 6y ago
Do it at the nameserver: OPNsense's Unbound blacklists do most of the job for my whole network - in particular it covers tablets, where ad blockers are a rarer occurrence than on desktop.

salicideblock 6y ago

Seeing that Plausible Analytics is not using cookies and instead hashes fields including IP address - the measure of "unique site visitors" could be a proxy for false uniques by Plausible Analytics. For example, an user visits once via his data connection and once via wifi - Plausible may see different users where Google's cookie will pin it as one user. Another interesting result is the 16% of total page views - I don't think false uniques could changes this. But it will be distorted by correlation of views-per-user with blocking settings.

sandworm101 6y ago
I don't see why the focus is on "unique" visitors. To compare to older media, if someone buys two newspapers then they are a double-good customer. Either they are spending so much time reading it themselves that they need two copies (ie reading via two devices/IP addresses) or they are giving that second copy to a friend (two people, one device). So imho page view should be valid regardless of uniqueness (absent bot detection etc).
- lucideer 6y ago
  This depends on monetization. If you're selling copies of newspapers, 2 purchases by 1 customer = 2 purchases. The number of customers is irrelevant. If you're monetizing via on-page ads or affiliate links (as the author is), revenue is much more likely to correlate to unique visitors than to page views.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> revenue is much more likely to correlate to unique visitors That's the bit I don't understand. Why does an advertiser not value a customer seeing an ad twice, or for a longer time? In fact I would say that those customers are much more valuable because their multiple views bookend an extended period of viewing an ad. If I view a website at home in the morning, then again while at work, I have been exposed to that ad for many minutes, as opposed to one-time readers who click away within seconds. That has to be worth something more.

tome 6y ago

Tangentially, is there some webpage you can visit that confirms which means of tracking your browser/extensions are blocking? I have installed Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin and NoScript on Firefox, but I don't know how I can verify that they are doing what I hope they are. EDIT: I suppose there's https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/

toastal 6y ago

I'd like to see the spread in statistics of what OS, platform, browser is doing the most blocking and who's most underrepresented. Not wanting to be tracked is very reasonable, but these I would guess are mostly to be your power users anyhow and now you're making decisions around people that may understand your product best.

eden_h 6y ago

Google Analytics has a fair amount of filtering by default - including bots/spiders. Went to Plausible's website, it makes no mention of this type of blocking. That 13% could be eaten into significantly by removing that type of activity. More convincing would be matching up activity across sites, and seeing for what sessions they differ. If this was a decrease in users who had significant sessions (>30 secs, for example), there'd be more meaningful conclusions to draw.

SahAssar 6y ago

And umatrix blocks both Google Analytics and Plausible Analytics since it blocks all third party scripts by default.

aaanotherhnfolk 6y ago

I know this was just written as content marketing, but a more accurate insight wouldn't involve the conversion to uniques at all. On one side you'd have count of unique IPs from the access logs at your web server. And on the other side you'd have count of unique IPs seen by the tracking tools you use. And even then you wouldn't be able to map this quotient to human behavior. But you would have an upper bound on how inaccurate your analytics tools are.

tatersolid 6y ago
“Unique IPs” is a terrible metric, and has been for more than a decade. Carrier grade NAT, corporate networks, VPN service users, etc. all will share the same source IPv4 address. In IPv6, the opposite is the case: clients will change their IPs frequently for privacy reasons resulting in an overcount.

donohoe 6y ago

I'd consider this a little on the low, but perhaps that makes sense given nature of the site and potential type of audience. On publisher sites where I've had access to analytics we'd see an Ad-Blocker rate of 8% on the sites with a 'good' ad experience (low programmatic, less crappy positions and UX) but as high as 30% on the crappier ones (saturated with banner ads, had Outbrain/Taboola modules, etc). (That was about 2 years ago so I would have thought that ad-blocking with continue its slow increase)

fomine3 6y ago

I don't care to be tracked but ad blocker automatically also blocks tracker and I have no motivation to unblock tracker manually.

scottoreily 6y ago

Sad violin

superkuh 6y ago

What happened to using your web logs? It requires absolutely no javascript and no third parties and there's no invasion of privacy.

vntok 6y ago
It also is completely useless because of the tens of thousands requests random bots and hacking tools do each day on most websites, the many network hops for mobile users, the utterly impossible task of counting time spent per page (on active tab), conversion tracking and so many data that web logs aren't designed to collect or present in any useful way.
- superkuh 6y ago
  They're actually pretty useful for me despite, and even because of all the things you mention. I don't know why a corporation couldn't achieve the same as my single person plus a bit of perl. I guess for-profit organizations just have unique goals that can't be met unless they're acting unethically.
  - vntok 6y ago
    Being able to reflect on what works and what doesn't is actually the ethical thing to do so that the business' decision makers don't spend time, money and human resources on efforts that are at best useless and at worst detrimental to the company. Employees or (worse) freelancers who deliberately retain data and keep it away from the company are utterly unethical in that they prevent the company to assess their actions and to take adequate measures based on them, including firing them if they cost but don't provide.
    - superkuh 6y ago
      You're assuming anything that saves/time money is ethical because it is beneficial for the company. But many things that are beneficial for a company are unethical and bad for actual humans the corporate "person"/entity interacts with.

idoubtit 6y ago

How many sites break because of Google Analytics being blocked? Do they even realize that their content appears broken? Many sites use JavaScript client-rendering, even for static content. Sometimes, the analytics failure blocks the rendering. I've experimented it recently, with a blank page for a French governmental site (securite routiere) and with a truncated content for an American newspaper (Boston Globe, IIRC). When you send a server-rendered page, you know the content is present, and very probably it renders correctly on the client. Transmission errors are logged by the web server. With a SPA, many factors could break the rendering, and the web server won't hear about it unless hard work is done to collect JS errors.

macNchz 6y ago
I think the most common and critical failure mode I’ve seen is when websites wrap click handlers for important conversion events (ie “Complete Purchase” or “Join Mailing List” buttons) in a call to a tracking script. Google Tag Manager has a callback system that makes it really easy to trigger an event and wait for all the tracking pixels to fire before you advance someone to the next page, “guaranteeing” that you capture the events. If GTM is blocked and no effort has been made to handle a case where it didn’t load, however, the Complete Purchase button just straight up won’t work. I debugged this behavior in a high traffic site several years ago and have since noticed it all over the internet. With how widespread ad blockers are these days–especially in some demographics–I’d consider it an important QA step to ensure that customers can actually pay you even if they’re blocking ads and trackers.

jamescridland 6y ago

1. the OP works for Plausible 2. The OP uses a non-standard call to Plausible which probably isn’t in many block lists 3. It’s in mine

lightswitch05 6y ago
So, the domain in question is ms.markosaric.com. Which is a CNAME to custom.plausible.io. uBlock Origin is able to block based on CNAMEs, but it is not a default configuration. PiHole V5 blocks based on CNAME as well, and it is actually enabled by default. I run a little blocklist project [1] and I've had custom.plausible.io blocked in my list since April 8th [2]. So, although I didn't have ms.markosaric.com blocked directly in my list, the PiHole still would have blocked it via CNAME blocking. Also uBlock origin if you have CNAME blocking enabled. [1] https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/ https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/ [2] https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts/commit/21fd108ffd29960474a1c47803307c776806fecb https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts/commit/21fd108ffd2996...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- brian_herman__ 6y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/f8qnpc/ublock_origin_1250_with_cname_uncloaking_is_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/f8qnpc/ublock... The latest uBlock Origin blocks CNAMES >= 1.25
- JeremyNT 6y ago
  > uBlock Origin is able to block based on CNAMEs, but it is not a default configuration. I believe this is the default now, isn't it? [0] [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.25.0 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.25.0
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- 6y ago

ubercow13 6y ago

>But Linux is also the least popular of the operating systems with only 8% of the total laptop/desktop market. That sounds very high, I thought it was still ~1-2%? Shouldn't Firefox block GA by default now since they enabled enhanced tracking protection by default? I'm surprised the number for Firefox is so low.

skeppy 6y ago

That number is wrong. It's greater than 13%. He installed another javascript tracker. So, he didn't catch any of the users that block javascript. Didn't read his whole lengthy post, but not sure why he just didn't use a standard 20-year old log analyzer (like AWStats or similar) to just compare _any_ visit by a single IP address over a set 24-hour period. Forget about page views, A/B tests, metrics, customer journeys, etc... that's what G.A. is designed to be used for (along with its competitors like P.A.). The question is very, very simple - especially for standard websites. How many different IPs requested what volume (in bytes) of resources from your server? We've been measuring that number on the web for nearly 30 years and it requires ZERO installs, scripts, 3rd-party services, etc. None of this would be so bad except that all the alarmists decrying abuse or overuse of G.A. and looking at alternatives are (generally speaking) not anyone that Google cares about. Google's attitude "Uh, go ahead and use a different spyware/tracker/script tool. We don't care about your crummy blog. We are still installed on 499 of the Fortune 500 websites. That's what we care about."

olliej 6y ago

Of course another way to phrase this is “13% of my website visitors are actively blocking my support for google’s privacy invasive tracking”

BrandoElFollito 6y ago

> We run it through a one-way hash function to scramble the raw IP addresses and make them impossible to recover. It is very much possible. The space of IP addresses is about 10^10 so a rainbow table for 256 bytes hashes would be around 1TB large. Adding the target websites would scale the size linearly