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How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

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Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#101

Post by SquareWheel »

saagarjha wrote: post #3

One of the corollaries to this is that if you are basing your decisions on analytics, you are probably under-representing people who block them, who often tend to be a non-representative subset of your users. I have seen multiple projects do things like stop supporting features that their analytics “showed nobody was using” but failed to realize that a significant portion of their (often technical and very vocal) use…

> “if you wanted your voice to be heard, you should have turned on analytics”

It's true though. If you want to be recognized, you can't be incognito. That's like refusing to vote and then complaining about politics.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#103

Post by strombofulous »

swiley wrote: post #46
RyJones wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

page load times go up

Unless you’re doing something silly a button can’t be more than a hundred bytes or so. That’s only significant on a 90s era cell phone. Then again most browsers have a print button.

They also won't have to include the print stylesheet (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/Printing#...)

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#104

Post by hilbert42 »

cgriswald wrote: post #48
thanhhaimai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases. Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?

How I use a software is not an indication of how I want to use a software. It’s what I’m doing with the options the software has given. If I’m really lucky, I’ll be like everyone else, and an inefficiency in the software will be spotted and fixed so the software will be slightly easier to use. In practice, I’m just doing workarounds to accomplish things the telemetry won’t explain on its own; and even if other users…

"How I use a software is not an indication of how I want to use a software."

Exactly. The ergonomics of much software is pretty damn terrible with users struggling to get done what they want to do. Thus, developers who rely on telemetry only cement-in bad problems.

It's for this and privacy reasons I always turn telemetry off.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#105

Post by colejohnson66 »

mobjack wrote: post #78
cortesoft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is visible in normal server side logs, especially if they have a lot of client side actions.

Then create a custom endpoint that records those client side interactions in a database.

So... client side analytics? Like Google Analytics?

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#106

Post by [deleted] »

Legogris wrote: post #94
ozi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. "Inexcusable" seems a bit extreme. Are you suggesting companies spend 10x on manual user research? Are you willing to pay more for a product because of increased costs to understand what users actually want?

Call me stuffy, but somehow I think that, for example, Ms Office managed to have more user-friendly UX (Clippy and performance aside) back when they had 0 telemetry.

[deleted]

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#107

Post by mokus »

strombofulous wrote: post #103
swiley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re doing something silly a button can’t be more than a hundred bytes or so. That’s only significant on a 90s era cell phone. Then again most browsers have a print button.

They also won't have to include the print stylesheet ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/Printing#... )

Can’t you just load that when they click it?

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#108

Post by AmericanChopper »

cgriswald wrote: post #48
thanhhaimai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases. Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?

How I use a software is not an indication of how I want to use a software. It’s what I’m doing with the options the software has given. If I’m really lucky, I’ll be like everyone else, and an inefficiency in the software will be spotted and fixed so the software will be slightly easier to use. In practice, I’m just doing workarounds to accomplish things the telemetry won’t explain on its own; and even if other users…

It really sounds like you’ve never worked on a product team that actually used analytics tbh.

> In practice, I’m just doing workarounds to accomplish things the telemetry won’t explain on its own

This is one of the most obvious things people are looking for in analytics. People will always use your product in unpredictable ways to get the whatever functionality it is that they really wanted. This is one of the things product managers are most interested in knowing about because they either want to properly implement that functionality, or they already have it and they want to know if they’re doing a bad job of getting their customers to adopt it.

It’s incredibly unlikely that you’re such an ultimate power user that what you want out of the product is so unique that you’re inventing your own usage patterns that others aren’t also following.

I completely agree that you should have the right to not share your information with anybody you choose. But if you choose not to share any information about your use case with the company that makes the product, then you don’t have much right to complain about it not doing what you want it to.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#109

Post by CivBase »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #9
saagarjha wrote: post #3

One of the corollaries to this is that if you are basing your decisions on analytics, you are probably under-representing people who block them, who often tend to be a non-representative subset of your users. I have seen multiple projects do things like stop supporting features that their analytics “showed nobody was using” but failed to realize that a significant portion of their (often technical and very vocal) use…

When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases. Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?

Customers should not have to surrender their information to be accounted for by the business they pay.

Giving a business your data is an act of charity. It should never be an expectation.

Yes, it costs more to collect the data manually. It usually costs more to behave ethically when you aren't legally required to.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#110

Post by nerdbaggy »

userbinator wrote: post #88

How many users who block GA are also going to not be honest about the OS or browser they claim to be? I suspect that number is going to be a much higher percentage than of those who don't block GA... I'd imagine most users who block GA/ads on desktop would also want to on mobile, but can't just because it's so difficult to set up an adblocker on mobile. A HOSTS file or blocking DNS server will easily do that, my whol…

IOS is super easy to block ads. There is an api for Safari so apps can use it. I like to use https://giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr.html
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