Live data from Hacker News

13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

markosaric.com

71–80 of 182 posts

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#71
post #63

Only 13%? (Just kidding!) Serious question now: how do we get this number to rise to 50%? How about 80% or 95%? I'm been on a quest for a long time now to convince people I know to install ublock origin on their browsers, but it seems to be a hard sell, even among more tech-literate people, the effort to convince them is non trivial. They stick with it after I install it for them, and they use it everywhere themselve…

The problem is that people still think of ad blocking as similar to piracy instead of as a security or privacy tool The other problem is that "AdBlock" used to be the standard ad-blocking tool, but now has been taken over by advertisers and allows "non-intrusive" ads, such as google

True, some more daring people go to google and search for "adblock" when I tell then they should install an adblocker, and I have to correct them and pitch "ublock origin", and that's when the defensive stance happens. They ask: "Why? Why not adblock? What's the difference? There's also an ublock without the origin part in the name, why is that, why use the other? it has the same logo..."

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#72
I'd like to see the spread in statistics of what OS, platform, browser is doing the most blocking and who's most underrepresented. Not wanting to be tracked is very reasonable, but these I would guess are mostly to be your power users anyhow and now you're making decisions around people that may understand your product best.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#73
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can collect analytics yourself, no Google needed.

Why do you think it increases user's privacy? I don't think Google uses analytics data for tracking the user.

It's expected when i got to a website that the owner of the website knows i've visited

It's not expected that when I visit a website unrelated to google or facebook that they know about it

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#74
post #22

Only 13%? According to some independent sources, up to 30% (and in some countries 40%) of Europeans use adblockers. If you're interested, I can try to find out the sources. This is why I use my own tracking system.

The most popular ad blocker is AdBlock, which does not block Google ads or analytics by default

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#75

Rightfully so. Shameless plug, a few months ago I began working on a privacy conscious UX/UI research and qualitative analytics tool [0] based on open source (MIT) technologies, which aims at offering a self hostable backend. It's in alpha, feel free to reach out if you want to give it a spin. [0] https://www.sessionforward.com

YSK that cloudflare removed the contact email on your site.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#76
Google Analytics has a fair amount of filtering by default - including bots/spiders.

Went to Plausible's website, it makes no mention of this type of blocking. That 13% could be eaten into significantly by removing that type of activity.

More convincing would be matching up activity across sites, and seeing for what sessions they differ. If this was a decrease in users who had significant sessions (>30 secs, for example), there'd be more meaningful conclusions to draw.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#77
post #7
post #4

None of my website users need to block Google Analytics.

Mine either. They also don't have to worry about Facebook analyzing click behavior via the SDK.

Are you not tracking your sites performance at all or are you just not using Google Analytics of Facebook analytics for that?

Are there any (open source) privacy friendly alternatives with similar basic features?

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#78
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can collect analytics yourself, no Google needed.

Why do you think it increases user's privacy? I don't think Google uses analytics data for tracking the user.

Google uses every datapoint they get their hands on to track their users. No matter if its a share button, google analytics, youtube embed, custom search, gmail or any other Google product. They can and will use it to track the users.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#79
post #64
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to say, but without analytics and campaign analytics, you probably don't know what your user want or need. I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior. Edit: I don't justify google and facebook wrongdoing in the past and present. But to hate on those who are (forced) using them and calling to remove them from the website is not helping without an alternative. It will surly take a toll on your digital presence…

I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior. It's not "auto hate", it's 25 years experience of making web stuff. I used to track users. I can read Apache logs by sight alone. I was an Urchin stats user before Google bought them. I had hit counters . I realised a long time ago that massive data gathering didn't really help me. I had a ton of data and no idea what to do with it. If you launch a site and find the enga…

Often I try to help sites with more generic, borked issues. Your comment about "Oh boy, will they tell you" brought one to the fore.

I sent the following to a site. Do you think I received a response? A reply?

Either they don't actually read emails from customers, or they employ a person which became 'confused', and their eyes glazed over, once they failed to understand the message.

(Note that I sent to about 5 email addresses. The one sent after I purchased the pillow, a website info, whois email addresses, and even took 2 minutes to find the CEO email address. Yup. No response from any of them.

And more than 18 months later (I just checked), the SPF record remains unchanged.)

I wonder.

While metrics may be helpful, I wonder how many only pay attention to metrics, and then ignore emails such as mine.

--

Hello,

I'm terribly sorry, but unfortunately you've sold a pillow to a SysAdmin. And now that you've done something wrong "with computers", I'm going to prattle on whilst your eyes glaze over. :P

But in all seriousness, I recently ordered a pillow from you. Yet your confirmation email bounced! Here's why:

May 13 07:10:54 XXX postfix/smtpd[32163]: NOQUEUE: milter-reject: RCPT from smtp2.shopify.com[104.198.207.207]: 551 5.7.1 SPF verification failure: sender host 'smtp2.shopify.com'[104.198.207.207] not among explicitly allowed origin hosts for domain 'canadiandownandfeather.com', and misses are forbidden; REJECT; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=

What's happening, is your SPF record does not list Shopify email servers, as valid for your domain name canadiandownandfeather.com...

You do have outlook.com there:

canadiandownandfeather.com. 300 IN TXT "v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all"

But not Shopify. If fact, the "-all" part at the end means "and nothing else can send mail!".

So, as you are telling people that outlook is the only acceptable place to send mail from? Until you fix this:

- some mail server servers, like mine, will completely reject your mail from shopify's platform - almost all remaining mail servers, will place this type of mail in SPAM folders

I must stress, that due to your 'outlook' line, normal email should work perfectly fine. We're only talking about email, using your domain, but from shopify's platform.

If you go here:

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/initial-...

And search for "SPF record", you'll see this:

-- To verify your customer email address, you need to add Shopify's SPF record — v=spf1 include:shops.shopify.com ~all — to the TXT record in your custom domain settings. --

Now.. you want to KEEP your outlook domain too.

So, just add "include:shops.shopify.com" to your TXT record, so both are there.. something like this:

"v=spf1 include:shops.shopify.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all"

Do this, and your problem should be fixed.

You can go here:

https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=spf%3acanadiando...

And check if things are done correctly. --

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#80
post #75

Rightfully so. Shameless plug, a few months ago I began working on a privacy conscious UX/UI research and qualitative analytics tool [0] based on open source (MIT) technologies, which aims at offering a self hostable backend. It's in alpha, feel free to reach out if you want to give it a spin. [0] https://www.sessionforward.com

YSK that cloudflare removed the contact email on your site.

Thank you, will check! Indeed, website is still in progress. :-) Meanwhile, you can find my personal email in my HN profile!
Post reply on HN