Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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The scary thing about this is that marketing folks still seem to consider the results from GA as somehow valid. With the result that non-techy demographics get counted more, and therefore marketers assume that non-techy people are more interested in their stuff. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fighting this fight at the moment:

marketing folk - "we're seeing more responses from old people than young people, we should focus on that market"

technical folk - "Are we allowing for the fact that older people are less likely to be blocking GA and therefore most of those untracked clicks are likely to be younger?"

marketing folk - "well, no, but we don't have any information on those, so we can't make any decisions about them."

technical folk - "but we know GA is blocked by ad-blockers. And we know that ad-blockers are used more by younger, more tech-savvy people. And we know that approx 60% of the visits to our site are not registering on GA. So... can we include that in our analysis?"

marketing folk - "...."

technical folk - "...."

marketing folk - "I don't know how to change the pretty graph that GA produces to include that."

Once had to argue with a company that on Firefox the website is just blank (white), a Javascript error prevented any content to be shown. Response was that based on their analytics Firefox isn't used by anybody and thus not a priority to be fixed.

Ohh that's a "computer says no" level of awful. As an aside, I've forgotten the name for this sort of anti-pattern.

Are you thinking of Survivorship bias?

Willful ignorance?

If the marketing people are only running online ad campaigns, then they often believe they can disregard people running adblockers. For non-online campaigns they use bigger product metrics, I've seen. GA is not always the end-all be-all, but for online ad tracking they use that.

I'm also personally shocked at how FEW people relatively end up using ad blockers. Its a night and day difference

It's about 40-50% now depending on country so it's pretty substantial!

What's the source for that number?

Here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-percent-o...

And this is 2 years ago so I assume it's even higher now. It's a lot more than I expected for sure. They only count consumers though.. Perhaps companies don't always allow it, but I always use uBlock at work.

That's surprising forbes has an article like that. It's one of the only sites I've opened on a modern iphone that made it uncomfortably hot.

And don't forget what I call 'the hell path':

Marketing folk - "Wait...if we're getting more responses from old people than young people and old people are more likely to run adblockers than young people, let's increase our spend on Google Ads because only people without adblockers will see them."

Technical folk - Get into woodworking.

Edit - If the technical folk push back, that's when marketing folk will say that 'the law of really big numbers' means that 40% of a big market is still worth a lot. Trust me, woodworking....:)

This is exactly that image of the World War 2 plane hit by bullets isn't it

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