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13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

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Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#171

Post by yonixw »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #84
yonixw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duopoly (Duo-monopoly) with Facebook Analytics.

More like duopoly with Adobe Analytics, at least among companies that invest in their analytics instead of just implementing GA or FB Analytics because they're free and never really use them. Adobe Analytics is enterprise grade though, and is usually only used by companies large enough to have their own analytics department or contract out to analytics consultants.

This is a very limited solution. For instance, how can you track what search keywords showed your clicked ads on Google? The advertiser keep and will keep all the power (=all the context) to themselves exactly because of that reason.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#172

Post by YetAnotherNick »

Nextgrid wrote: post #104
throwaways885 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chrome and android has lot more data than analytics, and if you go that extent to assume Google is lying and using our data, it would be least of my issues of Google using analytics data for displaying ads. I also don't think such a sparse and context dependent data like analytics would help that much to Google for displaying ads. They just want time you spent doing what, which is already present with Google.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#173

Post by superkuh »

vntok wrote: post #164
superkuh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're actually pretty useful for me despite, and even because of all the things you mention. I don't know why a corporation couldn't achieve the same as my single person plus a bit of perl. I guess for-profit organizations just have unique goals that can't be met unless they're acting unethically.

Being able to reflect on what works and what doesn't is actually the ethical thing to do so that the business' decision makers don't spend time, money and human resources on efforts that are at best useless and at worst detrimental to the company. Employees or (worse) freelancers who deliberately retain data and keep it away from the company are utterly unethical in that they prevent the company to assess their actio…

You're assuming anything that saves/time money is ethical because it is beneficial for the company. But many things that are beneficial for a company are unethical and bad for actual humans the corporate "person"/entity interacts with.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#174

Post by skeppy »

That number is wrong. It's greater than 13%. He installed another javascript tracker. So, he didn't catch any of the users that block javascript.

Didn't read his whole lengthy post, but not sure why he just didn't use a standard 20-year old log analyzer (like AWStats or similar) to just compare _any_ visit by a single IP address over a set 24-hour period.

Forget about page views, A/B tests, metrics, customer journeys, etc... that's what G.A. is designed to be used for (along with its competitors like P.A.).

The question is very, very simple - especially for standard websites. How many different IPs requested what volume (in bytes) of resources from your server?

We've been measuring that number on the web for nearly 30 years and it requires ZERO installs, scripts, 3rd-party services, etc.

None of this would be so bad except that all the alarmists decrying abuse or overuse of G.A. and looking at alternatives are (generally speaking) not anyone that Google cares about. Google's attitude "Uh, go ahead and use a different spyware/tracker/script tool. We don't care about your crummy blog. We are still installed on 499 of the Fortune 500 websites. That's what we care about."

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#175

Post by Nextgrid »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #172
Nextgrid wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chrome and android has lot more data than analytics, and if you go that extent to assume Google is lying and using our data, it would be least of my issues of Google using analytics data for displaying ads. I also don't think such a sparse and context dependent data like analytics would help that much to Google for displaying ads. They just want time you spent doing what, which is already present with Google.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. They can use data both from GA as well as Chrome/Android.

Ultimately, their business model relies on violating people's privacy and thus the safest course of action is to treat them as hostile and avoid them.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#176

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #140
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 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…

> they don't know they are bots. And they have a plan.

Nice subtle Battlestar Galactica reference there.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#178

Post by sigwinch28 »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #161
sigwinch28 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you've moved the goalposts on me since the parent was referring to GDPR, and so was I, and now you've brought up the ePrivacy stuff. Furthermore, it only counts as processing under the GDPR if anonymisation was performed as a step on some data already covered on the GDPR. Ergo, if the data originally collected qualifies as anonymous data, then processing it is not covered by the GDPR.

I think OPs question was if you can really collect "anonymous" analytics data from a client device without asking for consent, which you cannot really answer based on the GDPR alone. Yes, anonymous data is exempt from the GDPR, but the question is just if a HTTP request to a tracking service that contains the IP address and user agent of a persons' browser can be considered anonymous already (in most cases not). Some…

Yes, I think opt-out is specifically forbidden when consent is used as a legal basis, at least under the GDPR...

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#179

Post by d0gbread »

jwr wrote: post #61
onion2k wrote: post #4

None of my website users need to block Google Analytics.

Same here. Also, I don't regret it: I realized that most data from GA is actually garbage. Both because of its dubiousness and because "page visits" do not correspond to any meaningful actionable business metric, unless you are in the adtech business (in that case, rethink your life choices). These days, I worry about signups and subscriptions, and run my own A/B (bayesian bandit) experiments.

Not sure what you mean by "from GA" given that the tool collects what you tell it to collect. The data is only garbage if you don't have or hire the skillset to use it, and when you do you'll have proper leading indicators for your business metrics and quantitative prioritization support.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#180

Post by BrandoElFollito »

> We run it through a one-way hash function to scramble the raw IP addresses and make them impossible to recover.

It is very much possible. The space of IP addresses is about 10^10 so a rainbow table for 256 bytes hashes would be around 1TB large.

Adding the target websites would scale the size linearly

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