Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdriaanvRossum | Hacker News Reader

- Simplicity

- Privacy friendliness

- Features (like bypassing ad-blockers [1], see which tweets got traffic [2], events, ...)

We have customers like banks and governments who really care about the privacy part. Most of our customers use our tool because it has a very simple interface. One thing that also plays a big role is the likability of the brand. People seem to like it and are willing to pay money for its mission. We even had customers that didn't use our tool but where actively keeping the subscription active.

PS: Server side tracking is already possible [3].

[1] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers

[2] https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/tw...

[3] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/server-side-tracking

View on HN

You have banks as customers but only $4k MRR?! Something is going wrong here. Where's patio11 to tell you to raise prices.

I agree! I would have expected the banks to pay on the order of $4k/month each.

Maybe the enterprise plan isn't aggressively enough priced, or aggressively enough differentiated..?

I think by "banks" he meant "bank".

And by "bank" I mean "credit union".

That or the Enterprise customers have some sort of extended free trial thing going on.

And by "creidt union" he means one from North Dakota.

And by "one from North Dakota" he means "only in departament of immigration" of them.

Google Analytics doesn't report visits for users that have ad-blockers on, right?

I own a website with about 50k pageviews a month. This could mean that actual viewership could be -much- higher?

It's insane that GA doesn't offer a server-side solution like SimpleAnalytics does.

They don't have a CNAME style option; but it's possible to interact with their API: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

>Google Analytics doesn't report visits for users that have ad-blockers on, right?

It's not really on GA but rather the ad blocking plugin you use (Or even if you are using some browsers that try and block trackers).

As an example, if you use UBlock Origin, I think by default it uses the "Pete Lowe" list to block, which by the looks of it Simple Analytics is also blocked on : https://github.com/simpleanalytics/roadmap/issues/200

Typically UBlock is just a "block all" type thing. Adblock is a little different in that they started allowing through "Acceptable Ads" (Not sure if that extends to trackers), which people went absolute ape about because now "Ad Block" doesn't block "all" ads, just ones that it deems not acceptable.

But anyway. TL;DR; Any tracker, ad, CDN, hell even HTML Fingerprint can be blocked in ad blocking plugins, just depends on the will of the people maintaining the block lists to add it.

Most adblockers can be tricked just by changing request URLs, but uBlock goes one step more and overwrites Google Analytics functions with `null`, so it doesn't work at all. See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/src/web_access...

smart move on the "bypass ad-blockers", good luck!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com