Google (and others) please implement link analytics with "ping" or "sendBeacon"

Best/worst. I worked at an e-learning company that, thanks to ancient e-learning standards, really tried hard to figure out when a user is leaving a web-page to handle session exits gracefully.

sendBeacon was dead on arrival, for that purpose at least; iirc it's blocked by most ad blockers. (Or was, who knows with Manifest v3.)

Similarly we're unlikely to see sendBeacon truly replace tracking redirects, unfortunately. This isn't an area where tech firms are happy to see fine user controls.

Re: Google (and others) please implement link analytics with "ping" or "sendBeacon"

#7

Post by chocolatkey » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 8:50 PM UTC

LorenDB wrote: post #2

The best part of these methods is that they are (likely, from a layman's perspective) easier for a concerned user to block.

Wheb I implemented an in-house analytics system, I had to revert to using a normal fetch request, as by default any usage of the beacon API was blocked. I don't think it really makes a difference for big providers with well-known blacklisted domains, but for custom implementations, it does

Re: Google (and others) please implement link analytics with "ping" or "sendBeacon"

#8

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

> the links don’t redirect to the external site, but to an internal redirection link?

Yes, which is why I broke the habit of just clicking on links years ago and switched to copy/pasting the link text to extract the real URL instead.

The existence of the ping attribute and "sendBeacon" are why I won't stop copy/pasting links even if they stop including those redirects.