Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

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> The first is that the traffic coming in had JavaScript disabled. If this was the case then the JavaScript analytics software would not detect the incoming traffic and therefore would not be able to log the result at all.

Did you read their post? To quote:

> Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it.

Emphasis added.

If this was the case then the JavaScript analytics software would not detect the incoming traffic and therefore would not be able to log the result at all.

Most Javascript analytics packages also wrap an image call in a noscript tag to capture hits for browsers which do not have JS enabled. So yes, you can log the result with JS turned off.

That still won't detect bots. If you build a click-bot, you're probably only going to click the link and download the source. You wouldn't care about loading any images so the 1x1 pixel image still won't track the page load.

To track bots effectively, you need to check your server logs. In fact, you could build a strong case for a bot click if the requesting IP pulled the source HTML but didn't follow up with any image requests from the page. Not loading images is typical bot behavior.

Yes that would definitely tell him that people without JS turned on were viewing his page. It would not magically tell him that these came from facebook (or should have).

"wrap an image call in a noscript tag"

Although the author of the original post said nothing, i assume that's what they did.

You can also just look at the server logs. That's what most of us did before Google Analytics (and still do).

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