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Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

plausible.io

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Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#341

Post by _fat_santa »

63 wrote: post #330
jccalhoun wrote: post #299

I am amazed at how non-techy people use the internet. I teach college and I will sometimes have students go to some web site. I am amazed at how few use adblocking and just accept all the ads and popups and overlays and crap. Even more than that, I will see them using something like google docs and google will put an overlay for some new feature and they don't click the X to close it. They just type away with that ov…

Even with an ad-blocker, there are still huge cookie and "join our email list" banners. Banner blindness is just the way things go for most people. Fun little anecdote, in high school I had to work at a pizza joint but the screens where they showed the orders had a gui that looked just like a website. Thanks to banner blindness, I missed important info all the time because it was in places that brain had internalized…

Last year I was building a "Cookie Consent" banner for one of my sites. I wanted to be transparent as possible with it so I had this box come up in the corner to ask for permission, big blue button for OK, big red button (of the same size) to decline, zero dark patterns.

Looking at the analytics after the fact made me realize why these cookie consent boxes use so many dark patterns. My acceptance rate for the box was like 4%, I tossed out cookies (and the banner) in the next update.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#342

Post by ta988 »

yissp wrote: post #239
conradfr wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know a connected TV / set-top box is on a channel but you don't know how many / which persons in the house is in front of it.

How long until they start putting cameras in them and doing facial recognition?

Cameras are here and we have no idea what they do with them.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#343

Post by NmAmDa »

viraptor wrote: post #203
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…

> Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. You may like the "Google will eat itself" idea. https://www.gwei.org/index.php

"202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google."

Nice cosmological time scale idea

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#344

Post by bluGill »

DocTomoe wrote: post #162
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…

I feel this heavily depends on your goal. IMHO, this points at Firefox being used mostly by ad-averse, tech-savvy users, while the less-adverse, less-savvy users prefer Safari and/or Chrome. If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers. Of course, following web standards would be the Golden Way, and more selfless actors f…

> If your objective is to maximize ad revenue, the most obvious approach would now be to ignore Firefox completely and focus on non-FF browsers.

No, your best approach is to test firefox carefully to ensure it is broken. That way you encourage people to use something more friendly to you.

I hope I didn't give anyone ideas.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#345

Post by GuB-42 »

That's something I often think about. Are blockers used for fingerprinting? Especially by the likes of Google who controls both the ads/analytics platform and the website (aka first party).

There is a specific demographic who use blockers, generally of the tech-savvy kind. It should even be possible to detect the blocker being used and some of its settings. It would be ironic to detect that a user is blocking almost everything and show them ads for privacy-oriented products and services.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#346

Post by tppiotrowski »

happybuy wrote: post #27

As a developer of an ad blocker[1] our stats would seem to back up what Plausible has found: - Despite having equivalent desktop (macOS) and mobile (iOS) apps, most of our users (> 75%) use the app primarily on desktop - Most users say the key reason for use is for privacy protection; even with Safari providing some inbuilt privacy tracking protection - Our app is focused on providing a simple 'set and forget' ad blo…

My experience running a web server also backs this up. The number of GET requests to the back end is around twice as much as I see in Google Analytics.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#347

Post by 63 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #208

That's why apps are so popular with ad driven properties. No cookie banners, hardly any limitations. And you get to keep users nicely inside the walled garden. Anyway, I indeed use Firefox with ublock origin, multi account containers, etc. I also use Firefox on Android. A lot of stuff people assume they need apps for works just fine in that.

Same here. I particularly enjoy the mobile YouTube and Twitch experiences much better than their respective apps (mostly because of ad blocking).

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#348

Post by ttctciyf »

ignoramous wrote: post #248
htns wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall ever having heard about Blokada before, but looking it up now it doesn't seem recommended: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8536

(I created that merge request) Blokada's UI is without peer and so it makes for a very good "just works" for the majority (in fact, from what I know, it is the most downloaded DNS-based content blocker on Android by far). However, it is disappointing that some of their decision-making is found wanting: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/papgeq/any_...

Forgive the questions, but you seem to be a good person to ask.. How does Blokada actually work? Its FAQ claims it:

> prevents apps and browsers installed on your device from sending your private data (known as tracking fingerprints) to the Internet.

Is it doing some kind of packet inspection?

As a secondary layer of blocking I use DNS66 which intercepts DNS requests and fails them for blacklisted domains, by installing itself as a virtual VPN - essentially a cooked /etc/hosts for Android.

Would Blokada work alongside that?

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#349

Post by snowwrestler »

JohnFen wrote: post #297
WJW wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Listening to your users" is just a more manual form of data gathering though. Also, it's not like "hearing what you want to hear" has been invented by statisticians, that is super easy to do when talking to users as well. Some of the problems in talking to users: - people will often tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what they really think. (Very few users would ever tell an interviewing dev that…

"Listening to your users" is a voluntary exchange with your users, not compelling data from them. The difference between the two is critical.

It’s amazing how far the goalposts have moved on analytical data.

I worked retail in The Time Before The Web and we collected and analyzed data from our customers. We had a door clicker to give us a daily record of traffic. We did detailed analytics on what items customers bought when, to inform inventory and staffing decisions. We did regular people-counting studies to evaluate our merchandising in different parts of the store. We did coupons in local papers for which we could directly track redemption. This was all in the service of making the store work better for our customers.

Now, you might say that those are all anonymous aggregate piles of data. Well, so are most web analytics packages, including many client-side JavaScript.

Re: Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

#350

Post by jseigj43 »

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 have any links or references to that? It's fascinating.
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