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.
People who block my tracking scripts don't want to be tracked, so I won't track them.
I use that info to see how people use a product, how they interact with it and what I can do to improve it. Where my time and money will be best spent.
If people want to block them, that's fine, I'm not going to try and get around them, but their "voice" is also muted here. I'm no longer factoring in their usage patterns, their usage at all.
I don't disagree with your mindset at all, but could you be missing out on a large percentage of users and now know about it?
I've had it happen before, i'm not going to make the same mistake again.
It's kind of a hamfisted approach, but if you block tracking, i'm going to treat you like you don't exist. It's not that i'm trying to punish anyone, it's just that the analytics seems to be the ONLY reliable source of getting any kind of information about what people use. Surveys only reach an extremely small subset, or nobody at all (i've had them get a 0% response rate while there were tens of thousands of daily users), unsolicited feedback is almost 100% negative and a large percentage of it nonsensical (things like "I hate the new update"... What am I supposed to do with that?), requests for feedback on new features or changes might get a few good responses, but I have no way of comparing those responses with actual usage (especially when one gets linked on reddit and suddenly gets 10X the number of responses simply because it was linked on reddit). And then if you decide to go against what your 3 responses to a problem requested, you'll get more blog posts like "x asks for feedback, does whatever they want anyway". I'm sorry, but I'm done with that. I go by usage numbers and patterns only now.
Are you saying that you ignore server logs?
The short answer is that it's significant on an aggregate level worldwide, but the reality is that it varies _massively_ by country, device, day of the week [2], and even different sections on the same site. Additionally, there is small percentage of pageviews that have JS disabled you have to account for. This analysis was on HN earlier today [4] saying 0.2% of pageview worldwide have JS disabled, but, again, with huge variation (notably, Tor, but elsewhere too).
Q4 numbers are not released yet, but the trend is generally up, with some notable drops. Get in touch if you want more info or to set it up on your site [5].
[0] https://blockmetry.com/ [1] https://blockmetry.com/weather [2] https://blockmetry.com/blog/weekday [4] https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled [5] https://blockmetry.com/contact
With larger businesses, you'll probably see more server-side implementations as they have the budgets to ensure the data they're collecting is accurate. For a blogger or a small publisher without a dedicated tech team, there's nothing easier than dropping in a script tag and watching the data roll in.
[1]https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
We can only hope.
> 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’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads.
Digital privacy is an undeniable rising trend. Just stating the vast majority of people are not using adblock is, at minimum, shortsighted.
[1]: http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage...
Poor things, back to not knowing which 50% of the budget they're wasting, like it's the XX century.
The horror.
Seems like she has the right idea to be honest.
My non-technical friends have never mentioned ads to me before in the context of the web. I doubt that means they appreciate ads on sites but I don't think it occurs to them that they need to find a way to remove them. I think they appreciate that Hulu lets you pay to remove them, or that Netflix doesn't have ads, but I never hear "this website sucks because of ads." They just assume it's the way of things.
[1] https://pagefair.com/blog/2016/mobile-adblocking-report/
I have also personally seen around 30% users use ad-blockers, for a site with around 100,000 visitors a day. However, most of the audience for that site is people in twenties, so it's not surprising to see higher than average ad-blocker usage.
Purely for self-protection/anti-aggravation I absolutely recommend it to every casual user I advise.
Realize that the link in either the chrome or firefox case will be to the official addon site and in the mind of the user safe doubly so since it came from someone trusted.
What percentage of people who see it will spend the 3 clicks to install it?
* Note I know you have no incentive to actually do so its hypothetical many people are encouraging non techies to do so and have been doing so for a very long time the percentage that are aware of adblocking is increasing.
Its not technically difficult at all. It takes a few clicks to install and one click to disable on the minority of sites that don't work with ad blockers.
I highly doubt I'm entirely atypical.
The folks at Segment.io warn their users to expect ~20%, with the caveat that blocking rates vary wildly between demographics [1].
[1] https://community.segment.com/t/1889n1/how-common-is-client-...