Hacker News Reader

There was a report last year that more than 37% of UK traffic in people under 30 had an ad blocker enabled. I think the analytics market is going to have to shift to server-side tracking in the next 5 years if this trend continues globally. I welcome it, though.

View on HN

Server side tracking is already happening. It's not new or yet to be developed.

Not implying at all that it isn't developed -- back in the early 00s this was the only way we could do tracking largely. But Google Analytics is completely blind when you block it, and that's a huge percentage of the market. For example, simply loading a 1px image (the old way of doing a lot of server-side tracking, and still the state-of-the-art way of doing email tracking) is insufficient when the client is hard blocking the ad server. In that scenario the only way to do it is server-side at the actual web server serving the web page (not some third party ad server), and most large analytics services don't offer anything like that anymore.

> But Google Analytics is completely blind when you block it, and that's a huge percentage of the market.

Consumers of GA may be blind, I'm guessing (confidently) Google and other big players are far from blind today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com