31–40 of 108 posts
With the surge in Ad Blocking recently, part of me wonders how accurate the Google Analytics JavaScript tracker is today, and how accurate it will be in 5 years. I wonder if we'll see a trend back to server-side analytics soon.
We can only hope.
Echoing what others are saying, I much prefer Google Tag Manager. Many clients use a CMS which make injecting dynamic variables into a page a bit of a pain if it's not done via rules at runtime. The Next Web has open-sourced its Google Tag Manager setup ( https://github.com/thenextweb/gtm ), which has things like Scroll Tracking, Engagement Tracking (riveted.js), Outbound Link Tracking and lots of other things that a…
Echoing what others are saying, I much prefer Google Tag Manager. Many clients use a CMS which make injecting dynamic variables into a page a bit of a pain if it's not done via rules at runtime. The Next Web has open-sourced its Google Tag Manager setup ( https://github.com/thenextweb/gtm ), which has things like Scroll Tracking, Engagement Tracking (riveted.js), Outbound Link Tracking and lots of other things that a…
Scroll Tracking, Engagement Tracking (riveted.js), Outbound Link Tracking and lots of other things that are not in the default GA setup.
Tag Manager is definitely preferable in my experience if you want to empower non technical people such as marketing to make their own changes on the fly without having to bother developers.
With the surge in Ad Blocking recently, part of me wonders how accurate the Google Analytics JavaScript tracker is today, and how accurate it will be in 5 years. I wonder if we'll see a trend back to server-side analytics soon.
The percentage of visitors with an ad blocker depends on your site's audience. Outside of computer geeks and gamers, almost no one uses ad blockers. I wouldn't buy into the hype that the whole world is installing ad blockers.
The folks at Segment.io warn their users to expect ~20%, with the caveat that blocking rates vary wildly between demographics [1].
[1] https://community.segment.com/t/1889n1/how-common-is-client-...
Anyhow, for many websites you'll get more accurate traffic data with GoAccess parsing your logs and showing you page views and basic demographic data. Use it alongside Google Analytics if you must, to see the exact difference between what Google tells you your page views were versus what your server tells you.
Remember that it's mandatory to disclose to visitors that your site uses Google Analytics in their T&C's https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html (section 7, 'Privacy'). I don't see a privacy policy on this Google employee's page but perhaps they have a special exemption? Anyhow, for many websites you'll get more accurate traffic data with GoAccess parsing your logs and showing you page views and basic demograp…
Yes but remember that bot traffic may be more of an issue when analysing server side logs (a lot of bots still don't execute JavaScript).
It's hard to know how effective the bot filtering features in GoAccess are compared with those of Google Analytics.
With the surge in Ad Blocking recently, part of me wonders how accurate the Google Analytics JavaScript tracker is today, and how accurate it will be in 5 years. I wonder if we'll see a trend back to server-side analytics soon.
Honestly, I prefer the Google Analytics setup. People who block my tracking scripts don't want to be tracked, so I won't track them. I use that info to see how people use a product, how they interact with it and what I can do to improve it. Where my time and money will be best spent. If people want to block them, that's fine, I'm not going to try and get around them, but their "voice" is also muted here. I'm no longe…
I don't disagree with your mindset at all, but could you be missing out on a large percentage of users and now know about it?