71–80 of 143 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This also bypasses Ad blocker GA does a good job at extrapolating your data to account for users with ad block. Obviously not perfect, but good enough for most cases.
How is this presented in the UI? I have never noticed this extrapolation.
1. I would rename the pixel.png to something like image.png. Never call your script anything like tracking, analytics, or pixel when you don't want to be blocked by ad blockers. We use hello.js and hello.gif. [1]
> Log file parsing is an old-skool but effective way of measuring the traffic to your site.
2. By using a pixel image you can bypass caching. When using server logs without the image you only get the non cached requests. So an image like you use is a better approach.
3. Your image is being cached. So if somebody revisits your website your image will not be loaded and you will not find anything in your logs. Just disable your etag and add a expiry date of the past.
Awesome that more and more people are replacing Google Analytics with more simple tools. GA is overly complicated and has not the best privacy mindset. I built Simple Analytics [2] as a privacy friendly alternative.
> Obviously with log parsing you don’t get as much information as a JavaScript-heavy, Google Analytics-style system. There’s no screen sizes, no time-on-page metrics, etc. But that’s okay for me! This also bypasses Ad blocker. In the case you have a large percentage of technical audience (who presumably would have Ad blocker installed) this log can be way more accurate than GA. However this still requires setting up…
Cloudflare does this for free, and you can run it on top of Netlify, Github/Gitlab pages, etc.
I could not find organic traffic details like keywords that bring visitors to the site?
Once upon a time you could get this information from the HTTP_REFERER header, since search terms were essentially encoded in the query string portion of the URL the search results showed up on. Not sure how that holds up these days.
> Obviously with log parsing you don’t get as much information as a JavaScript-heavy, Google Analytics-style system. There’s no screen sizes, no time-on-page metrics, etc. But that’s okay for me! This also bypasses Ad blocker. In the case you have a large percentage of technical audience (who presumably would have Ad blocker installed) this log can be way more accurate than GA. However this still requires setting up…
While this is true, we found a solution to bypass ad blockers (which could be implemented by Google Analytics as well). My experience is that ad blockers only block scripts and pixels that are implemented on multiple websites [1]. With having a custom domain and a non analytics named script or URL, ad blockers are unlikely to block you. At Simple Analytics we created a feature for this where customers can point a CNAME to our server [2]. We setup SSL and proxy all requests to our server. This makes it almost impossible for ad blockers to block the stats of those customers.
I used to spend a lot of time looking at logs and trying to make pages better and more content based upon the stats. Then google stopped giving keywords and searched-phrases - I've since found stats of little use most of the time. I wish google would make search-keyword-hiding opt-in for users, and perhaps auto-opted-in if using incognito mode. I am sure most of my visitors would be glad to provide the search phrases…
Even if Google wanted, browsers like Safari are going to strip referrer headers of query terms as you navigate between sites.
Love what you are doing here. A few points: 1. I would rename the pixel.png to something like image.png. Never call your script anything like tracking, analytics, or pixel when you don't want to be blocked by ad blockers. We use hello.js and hello.gif. [1] > Log file parsing is an old-skool but effective way of measuring the traffic to your site. 2. By using a pixel image you can bypass caching. When using server log…
But this is a tracking script, no? If I were you I'd keep the name that way so that if people don't want to be tracked, they don't.
Love what you are doing here. A few points: 1. I would rename the pixel.png to something like image.png. Never call your script anything like tracking, analytics, or pixel when you don't want to be blocked by ad blockers. We use hello.js and hello.gif. [1] > Log file parsing is an old-skool but effective way of measuring the traffic to your site. 2. By using a pixel image you can bypass caching. When using server log…
> Never call your script anything like tracking, analytics, or pixel when you don't want to be blocked by ad blockers. But this is a tracking script, no? If I were you I'd keep the name that way so that if people don't want to be tracked, they don't.
If you really want to block you can enable the Do Not Track setting. Although I think this should only be used when you are actually tracking people (we don't). So this feature might be removed in the future. It's already removed by Safari because it is another parameter to fingerprint a browser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Never call your script anything like tracking, analytics, or pixel when you don't want to be blocked by ad blockers. But this is a tracking script, no? If I were you I'd keep the name that way so that if people don't want to be tracked, they don't.
If your business is to track people, yes. If it's to gather statistics without tracking people (like page views), I think it perfectly fine to bypass ad blockers. We even have a dedicated feature for bypassing ad blockers [1] because we think page views are not privacy invasive. We drop IP addresses from every request so there is no personal data in our database or logs. If you really want to block you can enable the…
You don't have to play the privacy game -- there is a lot of space between really respecting user's privacy and breaking privacy laws. But if you do, you should put the power back in the user's hand.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google.)