How many users block Google analytics? (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#91

Post by toastal » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

twhb wrote: post #28

Note that the 0% for Android is because Google banned ad blockers on the Play Store.

Root users like myself use tools like AdAway to managing hosts blocking. This will help cover a lot of ads in apps as well. You also have alternative WebView implementations like Bromite (although I wish it were easier to install and worked on Android 10) that can give you ad blocking in apps using web views too.

This is also missing the part where you can run Android without the Play Store using microG and F-Droid + Aurora. It's not a huge number, but there are still a lot of people blocking ads in one form or another--even if it's as simple as using Firefox or Brave for basic browsing.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#92

Post by zuppy » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

contravariant wrote: post #45

lettergram wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, on the one hand I can see that view point — On the other hand, that’s a fairly entitled viewpoint. Users are using infrastructure I finance, to do things on the website(s) I created. If you want privacy from the services youre using, create or host your own. I keep the data secure and don’t give it to 3rd parties. That information is used to fix bugs, improve / build services, etc. I’m not “subverting” privac…

Yeah, at some point we're going to have to address that (internet) communication is a two way street. Until then, your HTML is interpreted by my browser, any resources are going over my network (and only my network if they're 3rd party) and the JavaScript is running on my machine . So I'll be having them obey my rules.

I’m not sure I understand your point. It’s you who requests those resources, nobody pushes that data towards you. Are we debating adblockers? Because that is a different topic than server side log analysis and I agree that we should be picky about what we process (but it’s a thin line, you are using resources from the owner of that service though).

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#93

Post by elondaits » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

epidemian wrote: post #75

ben0x539 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect serious bots to masquerade as whatever the latest chrome user agent is.

Then you would expect for Chrome to show a higher number of GA blocking "users". But that's not the case: the article mentions that the percentage of users blocking GA on Chrome is on par with Safari. And I don't know what you mean by "serious". The most common crawlers (Google, Baidu, Yandex, etc) identify themselves as bots on the User-Agent very clearly. Personally, those are the ones that I'd call the most "serio…

The net is full of unidentified bots scraping content or looking for vulnerabilities (contact forms , wordpress logins, etc). On many occasions I had traffic issues and had to check logs and these were very hard to block, because they ignore the robots file, don’t advertise themselves in the User Agent and use a large pool of IPs.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#94

Post by Legogris » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:04 AM UTC

ozi wrote: post #34

thanhhaimai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases. Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?

Yeah, exactly. "Inexcusable" seems a bit extreme. Are you suggesting companies spend 10x on manual user research? Are you willing to pay more for a product because of increased costs to understand what users actually want?

Call me stuffy, but somehow I think that, for example, Ms Office managed to have more user-friendly UX (Clippy and performance aside) back when they had 0 telemetry.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#95

Post by Legogris » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:05 AM UTC

ozi wrote: post #86

roblabla wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I expect them to do manual user research. And “making the users pay” is the wrong way to frame this - product pricing and labor aren’t that tightly correlated. Besides, When we bought magazines the editors didn’t know what stories people were reading or what words you were spending more time reading. When you buy a tool the manufacturer doesn’t know how you use it. Why software gets a free pass at getting all th…

> wrong way to frame this this is the reality of how businesses operate. > product pricing and labor aren’t that tightly correlated. If you're the staff accountant, sure. You're technically correct. If you're the CFO and I'm trying to convince you we need to spend $1M on user research instead of $100K, you can be sure this is taken into account when modeling monetization strategies to recoup R&D costs.

> this is the reality of how businesses operate.

It's the reality of how a subset of industry operates, which doesnt make it less wrong.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#96

Post by eli » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

lelandbatey wrote: post #60

eli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server side analytics are overwhelmed by bots and crawlers and other non humans in my experience

In general it's quite easy to filter out bots and crawlers from your basic access logs, as most bots and crawlers will identify themselves as such. If you're running anything with an API, then unless somethings horribly wrong it's even easier: look at the number of requests being made to an API endpoint and spot check a few of the user identifiers (tokens, keys, whatever you're using) to see the variety of users. All…

A very sizable portion of bot traffic does not identify itself as such. I don’t know if it’s a majority now, but it could be.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#97

Post by Jach » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #12

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just ask people!

How? In surveys? No one does those. Plus, people often don't give valuable feedback when asked questions about features they want and use... people are poor judges of what they actually want, and will list things they think they care about and then end up never using or which don't affect their choices.

"...someone recently explained to me how great it is that, instead of using data to make decisions, we use political connections, and that the idea of making decisions based on data is a myth anyway; no one does that." -- from https://danluu.com/wat/

Sorry, your comment just reminded me of that. Are surveys perfect? No, but they have their uses, and plenty of companies find real value by making use of them.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#98

Post by kiki_jiki » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

toastal wrote: post #91

twhb wrote: post #28

Note that the 0% for Android is because Google banned ad blockers on the Play Store.

Root users like myself use tools like AdAway to managing hosts blocking. This will help cover a lot of ads in apps as well. You also have alternative WebView implementations like Bromite (although I wish it were easier to install and worked on Android 10) that can give you ad blocking in apps using web views too. This is also missing the part where you can run Android without the Play Store using microG and F-Droid +…

You don't even need root, you can have an ad blocker as VPN (AdGuard, Blokada).

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#99

Post by jeltz » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

RyJones wrote: post #51

swiley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re doing something silly a button can’t be more than a hundred bytes or so. That’s only significant on a 90s era cell phone. Then again most browsers have a print button.

I'm glad you reposted your comment. If you want to read the data behind many of the decisions, read these papers [0]. [0] https://exp-platform.com

That page has 30 papers so it is basically a (hopefully unintentional) "go fuck yourself".

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#100

Post by kludgekraft » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:21 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #3

One of the corollaries to this is that if you are basing your decisions on analytics, you are probably under-representing people who block them, who often tend to be a non-representative subset of your users. I have seen multiple projects do things like stop supporting features that their analytics “showed nobody was using” but failed to realize that a significant portion of their (often technical and very vocal) use…

Analytics should be one of your sources. Server logs is another. I know of a company that has a whatsapp group for people who've contacted them via support, and one more for "fans". Each of these bring novel perspectives, and its up to the org to extract signal out of them.