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As much as I applaud every alternative to Google services, I would think about these kind of analytics twice when running any kind of developer-centric service.
by heipei 6y ago
As much as I applaud every alternative to Google services, I would think about these kind of analytics twice when running any kind of developer-centric service. Chance is that your target audience is running an adblocker / DNS blocker of some sort and that this will heavily skew the analytics results: The absolute numbers will be a lot lower and you will only capture folks not savvy enough for adblockers. I removed any external analytics about a year ago when I realized that more than 50% of visitors to my service were blocking Google Analytics and that GA numbers had become meaningless (cross-referenced against access.log).
- fastest963 6y agoIf you're interested in how many visitors are using an adblocker you can use Admiral's [1] free analytics on your site. [1] https://getadmiral.com https://getadmiral.com (Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Admiral)
- 1123581321 6y agoBoy, is your company's product nicely done but annoying! :) Any plans to make the "continue without disabling" button harder to click in the future?
- fastest963 6y agoThe design and functionality of the Engage modal is actually up to the publisher.
- programbreeding 6y agoOne of the local news stations uses them on their website. They have a tiny "continue without supporting us" link that blends in nicely with the text around it. The weird thing is I always see that link while my wife never does. I don't mean she can't find it; it simply isn't there. This is using Chrome on Android. No root or anything special. Doesn't matter if her phone is on wifi or mobile. On the other hand, I see that link every time. It's been that way for about a year and I have never been able to figure it out -- although admittedly, I haven't tried that hard.
- fastest963 6y agoThe publisher can choose to remove the option to bypass the modal after a certain number of visits or after a certain period of time.
- programbreeding 6y agoGood to know. Thanks.
- trevyn 6y agoGetadmiral.com didn’t even get past DNS blacklists, so not sure what exactly you’re reporting: Blocked by 1Hosts (Lite), ABPVN List, Anudeep's Blacklist, Energized Blu, hostsVN, Lightswitch05 - Ads & Tracking and oisd.
- cj 6y agoI’m not seeing where the free analytics is on the homepage (at least on mobile). But I’m curious - do you have any off the cuff stats on what is typical as far as % of users with Adblock across various types of audiences?
- fastest963 6y agoTech-related sites can have 40%+ desktop adblocking. Mobile blocking is usually <10% no matter the vertical. The less tech-heavy the site is, the less adblocking but it's usually at least 10% on desktop. Also, on the pricing page there's a "Get Free Analytics" button that you should be able to click. If you have any issues you can let me know: james at getadmiral.
- JeremyBanks 6y agoAdmiral's paywall is so glitchy on mobile, when I don't have an ad blocker installed but it frequently thinks I do, that I've learned recoil in disgust from any brand that uses your service.
- fastest963 6y agoThat's unfortunate! Usually when this happens the user has a network filter, enterprise firewall, or something else on the network that's blocking some traffic. Publisher's have an opportunity through our platform to offer subscriptions as an alternative to whitelisting so you can view the site without ads. They can also issue you a free subscription.
- claydavisss 6y agoDismiss without supporting
- emptysongglass 6y agoProducts like Admiral are why the Internet sucks. Everybody treating the Internet like their own little capitalist fiefdom consuming everything you do so you can be repackaged and resold a million million times. I'm old enough to remember an internet that respected the sacred open ungated plain of knowledge. Publishers lost the privilege to monetize when they insisted on tracking, whether the visitor paid or not.
- Nullabillity 6y agoWeren't you the toxic sludges trying to DMCA your way out of EasyList and co? How do you sleep at night?
- iamacyborg 6y agoThis relates to an article I wrote and shared here recently about marketers being obsessed with bad data - ie looking at GA even though the data in GA is heavily skewed and potentially entirely misleading due to issues with adblocking, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016532
- lmkg 6y agoKeep in mind that the Internet actually has more bot traffic than human traffic these days. A 50% discrepancy between Google Analytics and access logs could be explained entirely by bot traffic with no ad-blockers involved. It could be ad-blockers, though. And I want to emphasize a point you mentioned briefly: it very much depends on your target audience. An anecdote from several years ago, around with IE was still the plurality of traffic on most sites but no longer the majority. Two web properties run by the same company, with different audiences. On one of them, IE did not crack the Top 5 in browsers, and was actually outnumbered by Opera. On another, the entire Top 5 browsers were different versions of IE, and Chrome and Firefox combined were less popular than IE6, IE5.5, and AOL's browser (which apparently was a reskinned IE7). The moral of the story is, what's true for everyone may not be true for you, and vice-versa.
- lucb1e 6y agoThe vast majority of bot traffic identifies itself though. Search engines from all over that you've never heard of, but they're all showing accurate user agents. I don't attribute every access by far, of course, but for a small website (with peaks to high HN ranks, so it's not unknown or that badly linked) it's manageable to tail -f the access log and see that the traffic you're getting matches what you expect after e.g. posting a link in a chat group. About 99% of traffic in such a case fall within the categories "human-looking user agent visiting this newly created URL that I just shared in the group" and "random bot traffic".
- mfontani 6y agoThe vast majority of what I guess is "robotic, but javascript-running" traffic identifies itself as the (headless) browser it most likely uses, i.e. Chrome. When such crawlers use a distributed network of machines to crawl, there's no easy way to identify them as such, other than _guess_ that they're robotic in nature due to them coming from "data centre" like IPs (i.e. AWS, Azure, GCP, waht-have-you). While such requests may well be users using those "data centre" services for, say, a personal VPN... the overall pattern is what gives them away. Not all users look at a page and then start requesting (maybe from a separate IP, mind you, but still from the same provider yet with the same UA) each URL in that page in succession. Crawlers who want to stay under the radar are much, much harder to detect as such nowadays.
- nsgi 6y agoHow many people using adblockers block analytics rather than just ads?
- ogre_codes 6y agoFundamentally I am much more concerned about blocking tracking that actual advertising. So I have my blocker set based on that. I'm pretty sure GA gets swept up as part of that.
- kube-system 6y agoThe default block lists on many adblockers will also block common analytics platforms.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoWhat tools are you using for internal analytics? Streaming logs into something like GoAccess?
- heipei 6y agoStreaming structured JSON access logs from nginx into an ElasticSearch via logagent-js, and then query via kibana. But goaccess is fine if you just want quick aggregate information!
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoThanks, may I ask how you are processing visitor locations? IP through some geo services?
- heipei 6y agonginx has a geoip module that you can use.