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Tangent: I find GA to be mostly useless nowadays for any website used by a more tech savvy community. When comparing the GA results to server logs and a separat
by whatever_dude 5y ago
Tangent: I find GA to be mostly useless nowadays for any website used by a more tech savvy community. When comparing the GA results to server logs and a separate JS logging script, and already discounting for bots, it's clear GA is only counting about 10% of my visits.
Too many people blocking that script. I have about 20 different sites using it that I manage in some form bit cannot couch for it anymore.
- throwaway3699 5y agoThis is why I proxy GA visits directly through my server. Full accuracy but less privacy issues as my clients don't require JavaScript and I can anon the IP myself. I'm surprised more people aren't doing this.
- lowpro 5y agoHave you written on how to do this/followed a guide somewhere?
- throwaway3699 5y agoThe Google Analytics Measurement Protocol documentation was used. We created a middleware which sends data to GA as a POST request (much like our regular logs middleware)
- a13n 5y agoUblock still blocks this
- rendall 5y agoI think OP meant that the info coming to the server gets sent directly to GA. IP Address, etc.
- lostcolony 5y agoI'm sure OP meant that. Proxy through a server != return a redirect to the client. And as mentioned elsewhere, they're writing directly to GA using a documented API; unless they are sending data from the client to the backend using a query and path that look exactly like GA's (which, why?), there is no way to know what client requests are logging data (and that's assuming they're specific client requests, rather than being logged as part of the actual functional interactions, using a session store, which if Ublock tried to heuristically detect and block, would block actual user facing functionality)
- jsmith99 5y agoOnly if it's DNS level (just a CNAME). Ublock can't detect it if it's really proxied through the server itself.
- a13n 5y agoYes it can. It blocks the request to your first-party domain based on path/query.
- throwaway3699 5y ago... and there are half a dozen ways to get around that too. You could proxy everything through a function that base64 encodes everything. It's an arms race. Besides, I was talking about my server directly sending data to Google Analytics without JavaScript on the client side. GA has strong adherence to GDPR so there's no legal or privacy issues I can see with that.
- ezekg 5y agoI'd rather use something like Plausible Analytics behind my own domain than go to extra effort just to use Google.
- throwaway3699 5y agoThis is also blocked by many lists. All I want is accurate reporting, so there's no incentive to go with that over Google, especially if Google can keep our data safer than Plausible can.
- marcosdumay 5y ago> All I want is accurate reporting That's the problem, accurate visitor tracking wasn't on the web design goals. But if you want an independent track to verify your JS report, the server logs have almost an almost completely disjunct set of problems.
- layoutIfNeeded 5y agoYou already have that in /var/log.
- throwaway3699 5y agoIt's not even close. Bot spam is > half of my logs sometimes.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoAnd as a user I appreciate your efforts to do this in an ethical and privacy preserving manner.
- tatersolid 5y agoHow do you do this? Doesn’t googles script load other scripts and post back directly to Google? Did you write your own scripts to use your proxy URLs with the same API?
- marcus_holmes 5y agoThe scary thing about this is that marketing folks still seem to consider the results from GA as somehow valid. With the result that non-techy demographics get counted more, and therefore marketers assume that non-techy people are more interested in their stuff. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fighting this fight at the moment: marketing folk - "we're seeing more responses from old people than young people, we should focus on that market" technical folk - "Are we allowing for the fact that older people are less likely to be blocking GA and therefore most of those untracked clicks are likely to be younger?" marketing folk - "well, no, but we don't have any information on those, so we can't make any decisions about them." technical folk - "but we know GA is blocked by ad-blockers. And we know that ad-blockers are used more by younger, more tech-savvy people. And we know that approx 60% of the visits to our site are not registering on GA. So... can we include that in our analysis?" marketing folk - "...." technical folk - "...." marketing folk - "I don't know how to change the pretty graph that GA produces to include that."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- taurath 5y agoIf the marketing people are only running online ad campaigns, then they often believe they can disregard people running adblockers. For non-online campaigns they use bigger product metrics, I've seen. GA is not always the end-all be-all, but for online ad tracking they use that. I'm also personally shocked at how FEW people relatively end up using ad blockers. Its a night and day difference
- GekkePrutser 5y agoIt's about 40-50% now depending on country so it's pretty substantial!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- querez 5y ago
- 101008 5y agoHi. I have a few content websites that may not be used by a tech savvy community, but by young people. Is it there a way to implement a GA alternative in a few minutes to compare by how much the stats differ? I suspect GA is not counting all my visitors.
- a1369209993 5y agoYes: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/logs.html#accesslog https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/logs.html#accesslog (for apache, obviously) or the equivalent for whichever flavor of httpd you're using. Consult `man 1 grep` for information on how to query it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago> Consult `man 1 grep` for information on how to query it. Or something like goaccess to get nice charts.
- swiley 5y agoSomeone needs to remind Mozilla that most of their users are likely blocking telemetry.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoGood riddance. There are many ethical ways to get the stats you need. I go out of my way to not use any Google services and I don't like when websites negate that choice by using Google analytics, Facebook pixels etc.
- tnolet 5y agoThis is on point. I run a dev focused SaaS and it has become clear that any metric we get from the frontend are severely skewed. Probably due to add blockers etc. Heck, I even use them myself. We now record key metrics just through our backend. No tracking, no cookies, just aggregate numbers.
- elicash 5y agoWorth noting that Google doesn't appear to use Google Analytics, either.