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13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

markosaric.com

101–110 of 182 posts

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#101
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is plausible also blocked when used with a custom domain so that tracking results are POSTed to your own domain?

If you use a CNAME (tracker.mysite.example → tracker.example), uBlock Origin on Firefox will still be able to block it. (I have no idea whether Plausible offers this mode of operation. I don’t see “CNAME” mentioned on their site, so probably not.) If you run some kind of proxy yourself on an unconventional name (e.g. “ads.mysite.example” may well be blocked) and make sure that any script it needs loads from your own…

> I have no idea whether Plausible offers this mode of operation

The site of the article cloaks `custom.plausible.io` as `ms.markosaric.com`.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#102
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the humour at the start might have been enough to make many people not read the email TBH. Something a little less tongue-in-cheek and simply nice/approachable is likely to net a better chance of response.

Hard agree.

You don't describe the business problem, but go into incredible detail about technical details that either nobody reading the email[1] cares about.

Even more than that - you're basically asking them to run random bash commands from the internet.

They shouldn't trust your advice, anything you say would have to be verified by their own team, so the level of technical info is useless to them. In fact, including all the technobabble mnakes it look even more like a scam.

Remember, not that long ago it was a common scam to ask employees to make changes to the phone system, which would give the scammer free international calls. Your email is idenitical[2] to one of those scams.

A better email would be (and this isn't perfect):

"Hello, I am a recent customer of yours and noticed that all your confirmation emails aren't being sent properly and won't be delivered at all for most users.

I'm a sysadmin, so had a look at the the problem using public data, and it looks like your tech team overlooked a setting when they set up your email system. Its a easy mistake to make and would take them 5 minutes to fix.

The technical details are that there is an "SPF" record which says who is allowed to send emails as your company - this is correctly set up for your office emails through outlook, but not set up for the automated emails from shopify.

If you let your tech team know that shopify is missing from the SPF records, and they'll quickly see the issue and fix it within minutes.

If you would like more information about the issue, I'd be happy to advise further[3]"

[1] The people who do care won't see your email. [2] To the untrained user. [3] I mean, I wouldn't, but you seem like you would ;)

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#103
post #40
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can collect analytics yourself, no Google needed.

Not ads insight which are crucial in digital marketing.

Ad insight can be done on your end by having each ad campaign redirect to your website with a "campaign ID" URL parameter, and you can measure the click/conversion rate by seeing how many people arrive on your site with each campaign ID.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#104
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wrong. They do anonymously: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397?hl=en Turn this switch off and there's no tracking. Your data really isn't interesting enough to track.

Why would you trust them though? Their whole business model is based on them knowing as much as possible about everyone so they can better target ads to them.

Facebook also tried the promise of "trust us to not use your 2FA phone number for ads" and broke it with no/little ill effects, so there's no reason Google can't do the same.

Building & running a service such as Google Analytics is not cheap so they wouldn't be giving it away for free unless they got something out of it.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#105

I've used Simple Analytics since day one of my site. Thoroughly recommended for privacy. Fathom Analytics is another option.

What kinds of actionable insights have you gained through analytics? Have you changed your site with the goal of improving those numbers?

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#106
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.

Is that 30-40% on all platforms or just desktop though? I don't have an ad blocker on my phone, yet use ublock origin on my Macbook + Chrome. I suspect this is pretty common, as it's harder to set up ad blocking for your mobile browser than desktop.

uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger work on FF for Android

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#107
post #8

I am not surprised by the low iOS numbers, adblockers are a pain to setup and I haven’t found one as good as ublock origin. Would anyone have recommendation for a good iOS adblocker?

I use Wipr. So far so good.

Wipr here as well, on macOS and iOS. Never have any problems, or ads for that matter.
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