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13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

markosaric.com

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Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#91

Post by donohoe »

I'd consider this a little on the low, but perhaps that makes sense given nature of the site and potential type of audience.

On publisher sites where I've had access to analytics we'd see an Ad-Blocker rate of 8% on the sites with a 'good' ad experience (low programmatic, less crappy positions and UX) but as high as 30% on the crappier ones (saturated with banner ads, had Outbrain/Taboola modules, etc).

(That was about 2 years ago so I would have thought that ad-blocking with continue its slow increase)

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#92

Post by throwaways885 »

moooo99 wrote: post #78
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it increases user's privacy? I don't think Google uses analytics data for tracking the user.

Google uses every datapoint they get their hands on to track their users. No matter if its a share button, google analytics, youtube embed, custom search, gmail or any other Google product. They can and will use it to track the users.

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.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#93

Post by paulcole »

onion2k wrote: post #64
yonixw wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to say, but without analytics and campaign analytics, you probably don't know what your user want or need. I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior. Edit: I don't justify google and facebook wrongdoing in the past and present. But to hate on those who are (forced) using them and calling to remove them from the website is not helping without an alternative. It will surly take a toll on your digital presence…

I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior. It's not "auto hate", it's 25 years experience of making web stuff. I used to track users. I can read Apache logs by sight alone. I was an Urchin stats user before Google bought them. I had hit counters . I realised a long time ago that massive data gathering didn't really help me. I had a ton of data and no idea what to do with it. If you launch a site and find the enga…

In the case of your 40% scroll map example, you don’t need to know why they left. You can start by making the page shorter or putting your CTA 35% of the way down the page.

Does anybody make the argument that analytics is supposed to tell you the why or what to do next? That’s up to you. The data just guides those decisions.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#94

Post by lsaferite »

b112 wrote: post #79
onion2k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior. It's not "auto hate", it's 25 years experience of making web stuff. I used to track users. I can read Apache logs by sight alone. I was an Urchin stats user before Google bought them. I had hit counters . I realised a long time ago that massive data gathering didn't really help me. I had a ton of data and no idea what to do with it. If you launch a site and find the enga…

Often I try to help sites with more generic, borked issues. Your comment about "Oh boy, will they tell you" brought one to the fore. I sent the following to a site. Do you think I received a response? A reply? Either they don't actually read emails from customers, or they employ a person which became 'confused', and their eyes glazed over, once they failed to understand the message. (Note that I sent to about 5 email…

I think the humour at the start might have been enough to make many people not read the email TBH. Something a little less tongue-in-cheek and simply nice/approachable is likely to net a better chance of response.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#95

Post by pgl »

Symbiote wrote: post #41
chrismorgan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when I run JavaScript (I don’t by default), uBlock Origin blocks https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js through Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list . Not sure if that’s one that’s enabled by default or if it’s one I’ve enabled. So yeah, I would expect the true Google Analytics blockage figure to be markedly higher than the 13% reported here.

It wasn't blocked for me, also with uBlock Origin. I found that it was only added to _Peter Lowe's_ list yesterday/today, so it wouldn't have affected the statistics for this blogpost https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?showintro=1&st...

Yeah, I added this yesterday.

For the record, you can also view exact timestamps on the detail page: https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/details.php?hostname=plausibl...

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#96

Post by iwannahelp »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #85
pachico wrote: post #22

Only 13%? According to some independent sources, up to 30% (and in some countries 40%) of Europeans use adblockers. If you're interested, I can try to find out the sources. This is why I use my own tracking system.

Is that 30-40% on all platforms or just desktop though? I don't have an ad blocker on my phone, yet use ublock origin on my Macbook + Chrome. I suspect this is pretty common, as it's harder to set up ad blocking for your mobile browser than desktop.

It's actually super easy now, with PiHole if you'd like to self-host or NextDNS if you want something that Just Works.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#97

Post by thdrdt »

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.

This is exactly how you recognize a good internet marketeer. They don't focus on getting a lot of traffic, they focus on getting the right traffic.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#98

Post by pdkl95 »

throwaways885 wrote: post #88
yomly wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh - the number of websites which were broken when browsing the internet from China because trackers from Facebook were not wrapped in exception handling and the endpoints were blocked. Literally couldn't give the companies business. /rage

Why should any company care about an authoritarian regime blocking facebook.com?

Pretending that any resource will always be available is shoddy programming. Check your return values, trap non-fatal exceptions, and always assume remote network resources might not be available. Forget China; there are many reasons an HTTP request to facebook might fail.

A website that ignoring errors when fetching a remote resource is bad programming for the same reason ignoring "file not found" errors when calling open() is bad programming.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#99

Post by gpm »

throwaways885 wrote: post #88
yomly wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh - the number of websites which were broken when browsing the internet from China because trackers from Facebook were not wrapped in exception handling and the endpoints were blocked. Literally couldn't give the companies business. /rage

Why should any company care about an authoritarian regime blocking facebook.com?

Maybe they shouldn't. But they probably should care about users blocking Facebook if they are at all ethical. They should probably care about Facebook breaking their site if they care about uptime or might compete against Facebook.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#100

Post by def8cefe »

lsaferite wrote: post #94
b112 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often I try to help sites with more generic, borked issues. Your comment about "Oh boy, will they tell you" brought one to the fore. I sent the following to a site. Do you think I received a response? A reply? Either they don't actually read emails from customers, or they employ a person which became 'confused', and their eyes glazed over, once they failed to understand the message. (Note that I sent to about 5 email…

I think the humour at the start might have been enough to make many people not read the email TBH. Something a little less tongue-in-cheek and simply nice/approachable is likely to net a better chance of response.

Yeah that first paragraph would have been better spent giving an overview of the information that was laid out after.

'I have found a problem. The problem has this negative impact. Brief description of problem.'

Be serious if you want to be taken seriously, especially in your initial communication with an unknown third-party.

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