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Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

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Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#171

Post by jsymolon »

sofixa wrote: post #145
dgudkov wrote: post #110

It amazes me that over the last 10-20 years an astonishing amount of money and intellectual capital have been invested in adtech and crypto but nothing in micropayments. Ads are evil, but it will remain a moot point until we have working micropayments. We have (and will have) ads with all their downsides exactly because we don't have micropayments, because ads basically work as a substitute to micropayments.

> but nothing in micropayments That's not true. Web Monetization is built on top of the Interledger and does precisely that - micropayments for web content. When i wrote about it[0] and posted on HN[1] the overwhelming response here was negative, presupposing greed and lack of privacy of everyone ( as in the website would still track and run ads to earn more money, etc.). The solutions exist, people just don't want t…

> overwhelming response here was negative, presupposing greed and lack of privacy of everyone

Because the history of other platforms which have done this, shows that ads didn't go away.

Cable TV, full of ads.

Satellite Radio, not too bad but still has ads.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#172

Post by scrollaway »

Cyberdog wrote: post #156
scrollaway wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By nature it won't filter out bots, however. One of my clients' website traffic is composed of over 75% bot traffic. Server-side logs are unusable for anything other than site performance.

> One of my clients' website traffic is composed of over 75% bot traffic. Server-side logs are unusable for anything other than site performance. I'm unclear how broad you intend that second sentence to be, but there's still a ton of info you can glean just from server-side logs: - Referrer info, and, by extension, popular search terms being used to find your site; - Paths on your site causing 5xx errors (so pages wh…

No, you're right, I shouldn't have written something so dismissive. (I do include error tracing as part of "performance" for what it's worth but those have their own system from within the app itself)

Frankly I would love to see some serious low-config solutions to analyzing server-side logs. Oh, especially Fastly. Client in question uses Fastly and it blew my mind to find out that there was nothing in place to answer simple questions such as "what are the slowest paths to respond", "which paths are a cache hit most often", "which paths are most hit overall", etc. And being able to look at various dimensions such as browser, bot traffic, country of origin, etc. If you have suggestions…

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#173

Post by einpoklum »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #15

There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) and some other groups. This gr…

Do you remember the name of this movie? Might it have English subtitles?

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#174

Post by martinpw »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #105

Why so little? Honestly, I believe the percentage is much higher, we just deliberately unblock certain sites for market research and so on. Most of the web is completely unusable w/o adblockers.

Maybe browsing from work? Some companies have policies against installing third party browser extensions.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#175

Post by yunohn »

Nextgrid wrote: post #137
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"large scale AdWords fraud." Be carefull - fraud is a crime. But I am under no obligation to provide AdWords any data, let alone true and reliable data. Considering the tracking and spying, and my legitimate interest in privacy, there is no room for fraud argument here. PS: this would be probably a Hoax

Fraud would involve financially benefiting from it - if you don't benefit I don't think it would count as fraud in most countries.

Where did you get this notion from? That’s absolutely not true, and there are many acts that can be illegal without benefitting from them.

I don’t think AdNauseum users would be prosecuted, but you’re still wrong.

source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#176

Post by Hnrobert42 »

thinkingemote wrote: post #58

One of the reasons for mobile apps is that adblocking is disabled. Explains why Reddit promotes it so much. Similarly, wrapping websites like Discord or Slack in Electron also gives the website owners full telemetry and tracking that they can't get in a tech savvy browser. Would an always on VPN, a remote pihole be the only way for privacy?

I use Little Snitch on my Mac desktop. There is about a week burn-in where you are constantly clicking to accept things. After that it’s great.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#177

Post by turbinerneiter »

einpoklum wrote: post #173
turbinerneiter wrote: post #15

There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) and some other groups. This gr…

Do you remember the name of this movie? Might it have English subtitles?

Free Rainer is the one I'm referring to.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#178

Post by ionwake »

jeroenhd wrote: post #140

I expected these numbers to be higher. However, an even more interesting metric is the 88% block in Firefox. Firefox may not have a great market share, but based on these numbers it's market share may very well be eight times higher than your analytics report. This can change the argument of "it's only 3% of our users so we don't need to test on FF" to "it's a quarter of our user base, we should at least test it", de…

Doesn't Firefox still include google analytics into its Preferences dialog boxes or something? Im finding these stats ironic.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#179

Post by yunohn »

Nextgrid wrote: post #169
jerrre wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the tracking part here that's hard. How do you know that the FB/IG ad was the first time the converting user heard of your product, or that it was the deciding factor? If you literally have no other way of discovering your product than this works, but it's easy for FB/IG to show your ad to users who were already going to convert and claim the conversion...

I see this so many times. Someone Googles for and then clicks on the ad for said product instead of their website which is the first organic result. Google claims it’s an ad conversion and gets the money, marketing monkey will happily take this as credit for their work and justification for further ad spend & their own salary, while the truth is that this user already made their decision to use this product (as they’…

Ad platforms, like Google Search ads, will give you metrics on clicks/conversion on a keyword basis (obviously).

No marketing dept is dumb enough to equate brand-keyword traffic with organic traffic.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#180

Post by klausjensen »

jerrre wrote: post #134
8fingerlouie wrote: post #79

I used to have Google Analytics blocked on my home networks (through Pihole/Adguard Home) with the exception of one network which my wife uses. She works with SoMe so not having access kinda interferes with her job. I've since moved to NextDNS.io to have network agnostic ad/malware filtering. Still keep a "special" configuration for my wife :)

what is SoMe?

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