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The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

philipwalton.com

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Re: The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

#101

Post by netzone »

joshdance wrote: post #79
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get around this with some fairly simple hacks. Write some JavaScript that evals a part of your page or something crazy like loading part of itself from Rot13 text file. Have this js generate an ID you can identify as 'real' or 'fake'. Filter your analytics by this ID. If you want to be extra funny make real and fake IDs look indistinguishable to human eyes. 99.9% of spammers are too lazy to spend any time fig…

Can you elaborate on that? How do you make the real and fake ids?

I assume he means something like the real ids being divisible by 2, while the fake ids are not.

Re: The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

#102

Post by ionised »

achairapart wrote: post #19
f4rker wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. The vast vast majority of people are not using adblock.

Sometime ago I read an interesting interview[1] with the Economist deputy editor, Tom Standange, saying things like: > The other thing about ads is that 41 percent of millennials are using ad block. My daughter has ad block and she goes around infecting every machine she gets to. She puts it on everything. > But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’…

> But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads.

Seems like she has the right idea to be honest.

Re: The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

#103

Post by throwawaydbfif »

joshdance wrote: post #79
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get around this with some fairly simple hacks. Write some JavaScript that evals a part of your page or something crazy like loading part of itself from Rot13 text file. Have this js generate an ID you can identify as 'real' or 'fake'. Filter your analytics by this ID. If you want to be extra funny make real and fake IDs look indistinguishable to human eyes. 99.9% of spammers are too lazy to spend any time fig…

Can you elaborate on that? How do you make the real and fake ids?

The spammer bots are so dumb that using anything besides default "pageview" events seems to work

Re: The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

#104

Post by seattlekiwi »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #57
jameslk wrote: post #23

It's pretty annoying that I have to create spam filters for Google Analytics to be useful. Every site I've installed GA on has required me to filter out spam. I don't understand why something isn't done about it at an engineering level. If site owners can set up filters against spammers, is it really that hard for Google to do it? Especially since they can see it across their accounts. Seems like it's the same type o…

You can get around this with some fairly simple hacks. Write some JavaScript that evals a part of your page or something crazy like loading part of itself from Rot13 text file. Have this js generate an ID you can identify as 'real' or 'fake'. Filter your analytics by this ID. If you want to be extra funny make real and fake IDs look indistinguishable to human eyes. 99.9% of spammers are too lazy to spend any time fig…

Can you share any details on this implementation? Sounds really interesting.

Re: The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

#105

Post by zimbatm »

codingdave wrote: post #65
zimbatm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Tag Manager is not very practical in cases where you want a secure website. It renders CSP useless because it requires all sorts of permissions like 'self' on scripts and CSS. It's good to have on the marketing webpage where no user content is displayed though.

Can you elaborate on this? I recently had my marketing team ask me to replace GA with Google Tag Manager, and I'm not all that familiar with either, as running the web site is just a minor thing I do on the side of my product work... but this sounds like something I should know more about.

On top of what peter_mcrae said, CSP[1] is a way to sandbox the page in modern browsers. But because GTM basically requires "root" access on the page it makes that sandboxing model useless.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy

Re: The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

#107

Post by flamtap »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #57
jameslk wrote: post #23

It's pretty annoying that I have to create spam filters for Google Analytics to be useful. Every site I've installed GA on has required me to filter out spam. I don't understand why something isn't done about it at an engineering level. If site owners can set up filters against spammers, is it really that hard for Google to do it? Especially since they can see it across their accounts. Seems like it's the same type o…

You can get around this with some fairly simple hacks. Write some JavaScript that evals a part of your page or something crazy like loading part of itself from Rot13 text file. Have this js generate an ID you can identify as 'real' or 'fake'. Filter your analytics by this ID. If you want to be extra funny make real and fake IDs look indistinguishable to human eyes. 99.9% of spammers are too lazy to spend any time fig…

I love me a good honeypot.

Re: The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

#108

Post by angry-hacker »

grey-area wrote: post #25
caleblloyd wrote: post #2

With the surge in Ad Blocking recently, part of me wonders how accurate the Google Analytics JavaScript tracker is today, and how accurate it will be in 5 years. I wonder if we'll see a trend back to server-side analytics soon.

On technical sites I'm seeing traffic cut at least in half by GA against traffic measured server side (excluding bots), which isn't too surprising. On others by maybe a third. It is probably gradually becoming more and more inaccurate as users install blockers. I doubt many GA users are aware of this though. Anyone else seeing this?

Does every adblocker block ga by default? Ublock sure does but few years ago adblock (plus?) did not.
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