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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty much a parsely ad. I think the HN crowd is pretty aware that ad blockers, vpns, etc can break analytics.

I think you're too quick to dismiss it. It's one thing to know that it exists and another to recognize that it's somewhere between 20-40% of your total traffic, especially unprompted. I've had many conversations where people assumed their traffic numbers was real until this point was raised, at which point everyone metaphorically slapped their foreheads and realized that they had forgotten to take this into account.

another quite fun thing is that this depends on your site vertical and demographic: on some of the esports-related properties i've worked on in the past, adblock rates (that also block analytics) may exceed 80%. i have seen 90% before (along with per-device differences, like you suddenly think almost all of your traffic is mobile - because all desktop users are blocking client side analytics)

When does this actually matter though? Isn't growth (or shrinkage) what you'd normally really care about (e.g. this month we had 10% more DAUs than last month)? I suppose if you changed something to attract tons of new users who disproportionately use AdBlock (for example) this becomes an issue as it wouldn't show up in your metrics, but is that sort of thing common?

I suppose if nothing else it's good to know so you can immediately beef up your numbers +20% in your slide deck for VCs.

What if you're doing anything which doesn't involve logins — public information, advertising, etc. – where users don't otherwise trigger something like account creation / logins?

What if you're trying to get stats about people who don't convert or otherwise give you a signal that they're using the site?

I've run into sites where things like signup or checkout are blocked behind an analytics tracker (Adobe used to recommend running theirs in a synchronous navigation-blocking mode) which meant that any problem with that service was completely invisible unless they contacted you to complain.

I also remember people wondering why Firefox users stopped using their site when they shipped the release which enabled tracking protection by default.

Good points, thanks!

I agree about this being a parsely ad. However, I also think there's a large minority of HN users who aren't aware about just how client-side analytics are broken or by how many of their users.

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