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13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

markosaric.com

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Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#151

Post by AndrewStephens »

GordonS wrote: post #150
AndrewStephens wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is probably correct. I wrote my own hit-tracker for my website and I spent a lot of time looking at logs to see if I could reliably track unique users by hashing headers and the IP address. My conclusion is that you can't - you will always double count some users. It is no uncommon for consecutive requests from obviously the same user to come in from different IP addresses. Usually these are either cell…

Business users behind an HTTP proxy will be another problem, as they will all have the same IP, and be using the same OS and browser (mostly).

That turned out to be less of a problem than I anticipated. Browsers spew all kinds of mostly unique information into the User-Agent header. This is slowly getting better as the browser companies wise up.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#152

Post by lmkg »

sandworm101 wrote: post #130
salicideblock wrote: post #68

Seeing that Plausible Analytics is not using cookies and instead hashes fields including IP address - the measure of "unique site visitors" could be a proxy for false uniques by Plausible Analytics. For example, an user visits once via his data connection and once via wifi - Plausible may see different users where Google's cookie will pin it as one user. Another interesting result is the 16% of total page views - I d…

I don't see why the focus is on "unique" visitors. To compare to older media, if someone buys two newspapers then they are a double-good customer. Either they are spending so much time reading it themselves that they need two copies (ie reading via two devices/IP addresses) or they are giving that second copy to a friend (two people, one device). So imho page view should be valid regardless of uniqueness (absent bot…

If the purpose of your website is to get people to sign up for the trail of your SaaS product, then you have very different reactions to "ten people looked at my product once and one signed up" vs "one person looked at my product ten times before finally signing up." In the first case, you work on improving your landing page. In the second case, you let people sign up for an email newsletter.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#153

Post by markosaric »

Symbiote wrote: post #141
jamescridland wrote: post #123

1. the OP works for Plausible 2. The OP uses a non-standard call to Plausible which probably isn’t in many block lists 3. It’s in mine

That is a recent change, probably prompted by Ublock Origin [1] or others adding his tracker to the blocklist. This morning it was using the standard tracking call. (The site owner submitted the site to HN, and is taking part in the discussion.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23819934

Yes, correct. I did the study with June numbers using regular GA and regular Plausible. Plausible was not on any blocklists until yesterday from what I have learned in this thread.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#154

Post by GordonS »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #120
__alexs wrote: post #20

Slightly off topic: Plausible claim that their cookieless tracking is GDPR compliant but this seems a bit shaky to me. Unless they are doing something that isn't specified in their docs their fingerprinting seems reversible which would make their user identifiers PII like any session ID you'd store in a cookie. AIUI the GDPR doesn't particularly care about cookies, it cares about you tracking people without their con…

You also have to adhere to the ePrivacy directive, which specifies, among other things, how you are allowed to identify users on their devices (e.g. using cookies).

I don't have a link on hand, but I posted about this recently in an HN article about Fathom.

There is an ePrivacy Directive ammendment that specifically prohibits the use of hashing identifiers (e.g. IP address, browser, OS) to work around cookies, even it a timestamp is introduced to limit the life of a hashed ID.

I'm a privacy advocate myself, yet find this a bit OTT - but that's the ePrivacy regulations, and I think Plausible could get burned here at some point. Presumably they know about this amendment and are betting that there will be no enforcement, or their lawyers have found a weasel-wordy loophole (I doubt the later, as the directive is very specific).

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#155

Post by [deleted] »

JeremyNT wrote: post #148
lightswitch05 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the domain in question is ms.markosaric.com. Which is a CNAME to custom.plausible.io. uBlock Origin is able to block based on CNAMEs, but it is not a default configuration. PiHole V5 blocks based on CNAME as well, and it is actually enabled by default. I run a little blocklist project [1] and I've had custom.plausible.io blocked in my list since April 8th [2]. So, although I didn't have ms.markosaric.com blocked…

> uBlock Origin is able to block based on CNAMEs, but it is not a default configuration. I believe this is the default now, isn't it? [0] [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.25.0

[deleted]

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#156

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

lucideer wrote: post #132
sandworm101 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why the focus is on "unique" visitors. To compare to older media, if someone buys two newspapers then they are a double-good customer. Either they are spending so much time reading it themselves that they need two copies (ie reading via two devices/IP addresses) or they are giving that second copy to a friend (two people, one device). So imho page view should be valid regardless of uniqueness (absent bot…

This depends on monetization. If you're selling copies of newspapers, 2 purchases by 1 customer = 2 purchases. The number of customers is irrelevant. If you're monetizing via on-page ads or affiliate links (as the author is), revenue is much more likely to correlate to unique visitors than to page views.

The value is screen time. If a user spends ten minutes on a site and comes back on a different IP for another ten minutes they're twice as valuable even without knowing they're the same person.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#157

Post by lightswitch05 »

gorhill wrote: post #149
lightswitch05 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the domain in question is ms.markosaric.com. Which is a CNAME to custom.plausible.io. uBlock Origin is able to block based on CNAMEs, but it is not a default configuration. PiHole V5 blocks based on CNAME as well, and it is actually enabled by default. I run a little blocklist project [1] and I've had custom.plausible.io blocked in my list since April 8th [2]. So, although I didn't have ms.markosaric.com blocked…

> uBlock Origin is able to block based on CNAMEs, but it is not a default configuration It is a default configuration.

Thank you for the info, I'm sorry I misrepresented your project. For some reason I thought you had to enable advanced settings.

Thanks for everything you do with uBlock Origin and uBLock Matrix. uBlock Matrix is one my the primary tools I use when researching domains to add to my blocklist.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#158

Post by markosaric »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #113
markosaric wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My idea was to use server logs too but AWStats showed more than 100% higher number of unique visitors and more than 18 times higher number in page views (both compared to Plausible numbers) so I excluded it from the study as I thought it’s very inaccurate.

As I understand that unique visitor would be higher (awstats, IIRC, considers that after an hour, a same IP is a new visitor), I don't get how you can have that number for page views. I guess it depends on people gowing back to pages and JS is not executed, but logs are updated ? Strange.

It's strange. My best guess is that despite AWStats filtering bots, many do get through. It was easy to see as most viewed pages according to AWStats were back end pages etc. I tried Webalizer with similar results too. I published the stats difference here: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#159

Post by GordonS »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #151
GordonS wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business users behind an HTTP proxy will be another problem, as they will all have the same IP, and be using the same OS and browser (mostly).

That turned out to be less of a problem than I anticipated. Browsers spew all kinds of mostly unique information into the User-Agent header. This is slowly getting better as the browser companies wise up.

Aren't Google planning on killing the User-Agent header altogether?

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#160

Post by lightswitch05 »

markosaric wrote: post #153
Symbiote wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a recent change, probably prompted by Ublock Origin [1] or others adding his tracker to the blocklist. This morning it was using the standard tracking call. (The site owner submitted the site to HN, and is taking part in the discussion.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23819934

Yes, correct. I did the study with June numbers using regular GA and regular Plausible. Plausible was not on any blocklists until yesterday from what I have learned in this thread.

Incorrect. Plausible has been blocked in my list since April 8th, including custom.plausible.io: https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts/commit/21fd108ffd2996...
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