
How many users block Google analytics? (2017) - luu
https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/google-analytics
======
saagarjha
One of the corollaries to this is that if you are basing your decisions on
analytics, you are probably under-representing people who block them, who
often tend to be a non-representative subset of your users. I have seen
multiple projects do things like stop supporting features that their analytics
“showed nobody was using” but failed to realize that a significant portion of
their (often technical and very vocal) userbase _did_ in fact use the feature.

Oh, and by the way, responding to these kinds of issues with “if you wanted
your voice to be heard, you should have turned on analytics” is inexcusable.

~~~
thanhhaimai
When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd
rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just
really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on
all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care
about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases.

Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?

~~~
cgriswald
How I use a software is not an indication of how I _want_ to use a software.
It’s what I’m doing with the options the software has given. If I’m really
lucky, I’ll be like everyone else, and an inefficiency in the software will be
spotted and fixed so the software will be slightly easier to use. In practice,
I’m just doing workarounds to accomplish things the telemetry won’t explain on
its own; and even if other users would want to do these things, I’m one of
very few actually doing them. So... I don’t really want to trade potentially a
lot of personal information just for... I don’t know... to make it easier for
developers to develop for the lowest common denominator rather than me?

~~~
AmericanChopper
It really sounds like you’ve never worked on a product team that actually used
analytics tbh.

> In practice, I’m just doing workarounds to accomplish things the telemetry
> won’t explain on its own

This is one of the most obvious things people are looking for in analytics.
People will always use your product in unpredictable ways to get the whatever
functionality it is that they really wanted. This is one of the things product
managers are most interested in knowing about because they either want to
properly implement that functionality, or they already have it and they want
to know if they’re doing a bad job of getting their customers to adopt it.

It’s incredibly unlikely that you’re such an ultimate power user that what you
want out of the product is so unique that you’re inventing your own usage
patterns that others aren’t also following.

I completely agree that you should have the right to not share your
information with anybody you choose. But if you choose not to share any
information about your use case with the company that makes the product, then
you don’t have much right to complain about it not doing what you want it to.

~~~
stedaniels
Analytics driven development is like flying a plane on instruments only with
all the windows covered up. I mean, sure, you'll get there, but compared to
flying normally you are missing out on so much.

Watching individual user sessions from session recordings provides more depth,
but you are still missing out on great swathes of information.

Analytics and session recordings don't give anything near as much concrete
data as taking the time to engage with your users. You then use analytics to
confirm behaviour.

~~~
marcosdumay
> sure, you'll get there

Hum... On real life you would quickly discover how vulnerable all of your
instruments are sensitive to both random and bad-intended interference.

You can apply the same phrase as a metaphor for software.

~~~
joshuamorton
> Hum... On real life you would quickly discover how vulnerable all of your
> instruments are sensitive to both random and bad-intended interference.

Well no, commercial pilots have to be rated IFR. Flying via instruments only
is completely normal and part of the training. Visual is perhaps easier for
many people, but you lose the use of visual navigation in all kinds of
circumstances, like at night, over the ocean, or in a storm.

------
furtive808
I run a non-tech eCommerce site in North America that does $6-8m a year and I
tested two 90 day periods year over year and found 12.4% of transactions
didn’t show up in Google Analytics. I haven’t segmented them by geo yet but
about 75% of my sales are in North America. There was only a 0.1% difference
year over year.

~~~
throwaway6845
This is very similar to my experience. I recently measured the difference on
my site as 10%-15% (also a non-tech site, though sadly not at $8m a year yet!)

------
jefftk
This test compares:

1\. Number of visitors as recorded in Google Analytics

2\. Number of loads of a 1x1 pixel served on a different domain

They see higher numbers for (2) than (1), and attribute the difference to
users blocking Google Analytics.

I don't see them describing how they excluded bot traffic, however, and for my
sites the _majority_ of hits I get are from bots. Only some bots run JS, so I
suspect their numbers for blocking users are thoroughly diluted by these bots.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

~~~
epidemian
It's not just two numbers of total hits the article is comparing.

The author extracted the browser information from the server logs (presumably
from the User-Agent header i guess?). If they were able to do this, i'd assume
they also filtered out bots from the tally :)

~~~
ben0x539
I'd expect serious bots to masquerade as whatever the latest chrome user agent
is.

~~~
epidemian
Then you would expect for Chrome to show a higher number of GA blocking
"users". But that's not the case: the article mentions that the percentage of
users blocking GA on Chrome is on par with Safari.

And I don't know what you mean by "serious". The most common crawlers (Google,
Baidu, Yandex, etc) identify themselves as bots on the User-Agent very
clearly. Personally, those are the ones that I'd call the most "serious". And
also the ones which I've seen generating the most on servers.

~~~
elondaits
The net is full of unidentified bots scraping content or looking for
vulnerabilities (contact forms , wordpress logins, etc). On many occasions I
had traffic issues and had to check logs and these were very hard to block,
because they ignore the robots file, don’t advertise themselves in the User
Agent and use a large pool of IPs.

~~~
luckylion
I don't know why this comment is downvoted, it mirrors my experience. I'm
responsible for a few domestic high traffic websites and have done some
analysis from log files to find suspicious traffic, i.e. user agents saying
they are chrome but not loading images or css files, having many page views
(i.e. 50 where our average user has 2) etc. It wasn't foolproof but the false-
positives where < 10% in my random checks. These bots made up ~10-15% of page
views.

------
neiman
I run a geek-tech blog in Hebrew. I used analytics for a while in the past,
but the numbers were completely off. There were posts with almost more
comments than visitors based on the analytics.

Took me a while to realize that most of my readers block analytics since
they're super privacy-saavy. I shut the tool down, it's useless for some
crowds.

Nowadays I also doubt if it's ethical for any crowd.

------
technion
What's interesting to me about the number of people who block Google
analytics, is the number of people working with those analytics in product
management, marketing or SEO, that are apparently unaware of anyone being able
to block Google Analytics.

~~~
soared
Everyone I know who works in digital marketing (a lot of people) use ad block
on their personal devices.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I often wonder whether Page and Brin install an ad blocker.

~~~
alkonaut
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was mandated by company policy at google and
Facebook.

Any company that does machine images for employees should ship them with
adblockers preinstalled. There are zero downsides.

------
lettergram
This is why I have analytics on the JavaScript side and server side. I can
calculate those who block my analytics and at the same time capture a lot of
the relevant information

~~~
saagarjha
Subverting the desires of people who would like privacy is not a good look.

~~~
lettergram
I mean, on the one hand I can see that view point —

On the other hand, that’s a fairly entitled viewpoint.

Users are using infrastructure I finance, to do things on the website(s) I
created. If you want privacy from the services youre using, create or host
your own.

I keep the data secure and don’t give it to 3rd parties. That information is
used to fix bugs, improve / build services, etc.

I’m not “subverting” privacy, users are coming to my house and playing with my
things, so to speak.

~~~
contravariant
Yeah, at some point we're going to have to address that (internet)
communication is a two way street.

Until then, your HTML is interpreted by my browser, any resources are going
over my network (and _only_ my network if they're 3rd party) and the
JavaScript is running on my machine . So I'll be having them obey my rules.

~~~
zuppy
I’m not sure I understand your point. It’s you who requests those resources,
nobody pushes that data towards you. Are we debating adblockers? Because that
is a different topic than server side log analysis and I agree that we should
be picky about what we process (but it’s a thin line, you are using resources
from the owner of that service though).

~~~
danieldk
_It’s you who requests those resources,_

That does not matter, at least in the EU where citizens are protected by the
GDPR. Article 6 of the GDPR:

 _Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of
the following applies:

(a) the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her
personal data for one or more specific purposes;_

~~~
system2
You are changing directions with your comment.

"his or her personal data"

Analytics is not personal. No one shares their names or social security
number. And I strongly agree with people above mentioning The Visitor is the
requester. We provide services, they use it, we want to understand what we are
doing by checking analytics. Nothing immoral about this.

~~~
danieldk
You don’t get to redefine ‘personal data’ ;). The GDPR is clear about that:

* ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;*

In the legal opinions that the EU provides with the GDPR, random tokens that
are associated with a person are PD. An IP address is also considered personal
data:

[https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-
protection/refo...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-
protection/reform/what-personal-data_en#examples-of-personal-data)

 _Nothing immoral about this._

What is ethical is a personal opinion, but collecting personal data (following
the definition above) is simply not legal without consent in the EU.

~~~
cameronbrown
IP addresses might not even get associated with analytics events - just used
for basic counting of different users before aggregation? At that point you
have no right to it.

------
TomGullen
We do ~1.1m sessions per month according to GA, comparing to our Clofudflare
visitor data real number is ~35% higher. I think CF is going to be as accurate
as possible and both say the filter bots out.

------
mijustin
I recently got tired of Google Analytics (for a number of reasons) and
switched to Fathom Analytics.

Now, Ghostery says I have "zero trackers" on my personal site.

Fathom doesn't collect personal info about my visitors. They just show me my
aggregate metrics (popular pages, top referrers) which is all I need anyway.

~~~
going_to_800
Unfortunately it's just a matter of time. I have no doubt they will get added
to uBlock pretty soon. Most people don't make a difference between tracking
anonymously for data aggregation and tracking individual users. Many are
paranoid and think that any type of tracking is bad.

~~~
notRobot
It's because it only takes one flip of a switch to go from collecting
aggregate data to collecting heavily personalised data.

------
gradschool
> I was expecting Firefox to be the largest, but it was a bit surprising to me
> that Safari and Chrome were approximately equal

Don't forget about all those smartasses spoofing their user agent just to make
your life even harder.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/random_user_a...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/random_user_agent/)

~~~
lousken
other smartasses runs sites that block firefox with "unsupported browser"
message while the site's working perfectly fine

------
twhb
Note that the 0% for Android is because Google banned ad blockers on the Play
Store.

~~~
system2
I am certain many jailbroken androids are out there using adblockers. Firefox
also has plugins internally blocking ads.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/adblock-
plus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/adblock-plus/)

~~~
bmn__
You are doing HN readers a disservice by recommending ABP! It is mafia
software.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17639624)

[https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-
but...](https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-but-not-why-
you-think-13280e76c8e7)

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mobilegeeks.de%2Fadblock-
plus-undercover-einblicke-in-ein-mafioeses-werbenetzwerk%2F)

Recommend uBlock Origin instead. "Free. Open source. For users by users. No
donations sought."
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#installation](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#installation)

------
djsumdog
> There was also one BSD user in the sample, who blocked google analytics.

There's always one

~~~
IggleSniggle
That one needs to up their anti-fingerprint game. Showing up as BSD narrows
your identity group _very_ significantly, and I would wager is enough to
identify you uniquely in many cases when correlated with all other
information.

------
wideasleep1
Turned it off via PiHole, so my ChromeOS laptops and Androids are covered at
home, still trying to get Wireguard set up on the PiHole to allow remote VPN,
while suffering double-NAT/CGNat through my AT&T hotpsot as home connection.
Turns out it's not a slam-dunk!

------
trishume
FWIW the numbers for my blog are broadly similar, with a larger sample taken
when I had a blog post on HN, with about 2x higher unique user numbers from
Cloudflare analytics (server side) than Google Analytics.

------
ronyfadel
Is there a free server-side analytics service that’s not a pain to set up? I’m
using Netlify, but enabling analytics is 9$/site/month, so I tell myself that
GA is just fine.

~~~
imron
I like GoAccess: [https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/)

~~~
cmroanirgo
Side note: looking at the 'live demo'
([https://rt.goaccess.io/](https://rt.goaccess.io/)) I see a very large number
of people using MSIE (9%) vs Edge (1%).

I wonder if this is actual data?

~~~
wizzwizz4
Probably is. There was a very long period of time where I used to use Internet
Explorer 11 religiously (though obviously Firefox when that was installed),
since both Edge and Chrome were the only other options. I only stopped when
the lack of ES6 support started causing me major problems.

------
onyva
Not only advanced users. At least as of 2019 we for example have pihole
installed LAN wide at home and Lockdown on all portable devices. Also
recommend or installed on devices of anyone I know, technical or not and of
course my number one recommendation to anyone is to install Firefox and avoid
chrome.

------
Narkov
Does this take into account bots and other non-human stuff GA might block?
Server logs and GA are measuring different things.

~~~
Ayesh
I don't think there is an effective way to distinguish bots from real users
when a UA is faking what it is. IP filtering or other measures can help, but
you ultimately rely on the UA strong from the UA.

~~~
Narkov
That's true for the server logs but GA has access to much more information to
make a decision like that. My point is that comparing server logs to GA
results is invalid.

------
zzo38computer
I refuse to implement client-side analytics; for one thing, it is a waste of
bandwidth, and for the other thing, it is not how software should be designed,
and for the other other thing, it is unethical.

I do log some stuff sent to the server, as well as some stuff about the
response (such as the HTTP status code, data size, timing, etc), although I do
not sell this data to anyone else, and this logged data is reduced further if
the client sends a "DNT:1" header.

But decisions about how to make something would normally be based on actual
comments by the users, rather than analytics, I should think.

------
userbinator
How many users who block GA are also going to not be honest about the OS or
browser they claim to be? I suspect that number is going to be a much higher
percentage than of those who don't block GA...

 _I 'd imagine most users who block GA/ads on desktop would also want to on
mobile, but can't just because it's so difficult to set up an adblocker on
mobile._

A HOSTS file or blocking DNS server will easily do that, my whole network in
fact has GA and a bunch of other crap blocked this way. On the other hand,
setting up a MITM proxy/VPN is much much harder on mobile. However I am
surprised at the 0% for Android and 17% for iOS blocking GA --- I was
expecting it to be the opposite, with the former being historically much less
of a walled-garden than the latter.

On the other hand, perhaps everyone who blocks GA and uses Android is in the
aforementioned situation of not saying that they're using Android --- they may
be reporting a Linux or some other user-agent.

~~~
nerdbaggy
IOS is super easy to block ads. There is an api for Safari so apps can use it.
I like to use
[https://giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr.html](https://giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr.html)

~~~
saagarjha
Note that this only works in Safari and in certain contexts inside of apps.

------
pachico
I find it quite surprising how many companies don't invest enough in having a
certain maturity in terms of web analytics, despite they heavily invested in
CRM, machine learning and other fields. Ad-blockers are still not considered a
fact in data gathering nor in QA or, in the best case, just a minor
singularity. Despite different sources agree on a +30% of usage, at least in
Europe, they're still ignored. Still many business decisions are based on
solutions like GA. If decisions were to be taken on any other source, let's
say polls, marketing studies, etc., after being warned of a 30% of
uncertainty, people would be very reluctant to choose A over B. This is not
the case for web analytics, it seems. Now technology has evolved and any
medium size company should harvest their own data (yes, stop giving away some
of your most valuable data to third parties, please!).

------
darepublic
would it be naive to say that sites can get around the blockers by proxying
their analytics through their own domain? Isn't the lazy way of sending
everything directly to ga from the client the cause here -- and any thoughtful
site owner should be able to circumvent this if they truly care to?

~~~
IggleSniggle
ssshhhhh. Don't give people ideas

~~~
fwn
That's actually (as far as I understood) something ublock origin seems to
address in one of their most recent updates. See 1.25.0 release description:

> From now on uBO will CNAME-uncloak network requests.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases)

~~~
SahAssar
That only blocks CNAME-based domains, not proxying. proxying is pretty hard to
block unless the request is using paths that obviously go to
analytics/trackers.

------
pachico
I have started some weeks ago this project: [https://github.com/iris-
analytics](https://github.com/iris-analytics) It's a small JS that gathers
data and sends it to a Go backend to then be stored in ClickHouse. Although
there's lots to do, we use it in production successfully. Remember ClickHouse
was born precisely for web analytics where a single instance can handle
hundreds of millions of inserts per day with no effort. I did this because
stats say adblocker penetration in Europe is beyond 30% and this would give us
real time insights with no sampling and ad-hoc queries.

If you want to help me out, you are very welcome!!!

~~~
einpoklum
Perhaps you should post it on "Show HN".

~~~
pachico
Thanks for the suggestion. As soon as I document it better I certainly will.
This was more of a call for help :)

------
XCSme
I actually noticed this when testing what kind of users Facebook ads brought
to my site. The numbers from Google Analytics didn't seem to match the number
of clicks reported by Facebook.

As a side note, those users were useless anyway as all of them were bots:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_ads_100_fake_clicks/)

------
makeee
I run a web-based tool for devs and about 40% of customers aren’t showing up
in Google Analytics.

------
terrycody
Expect at least 5% of traffics are bots if you have a large amount of
traffics.

------
aabbcc1241
Is it really that hard to self host analysis service natively from the web
server?

Why would you handover the data to third party when you don't have to?

------
monadic2
How many “users” of google analytics are worth it anyway?

~~~
system2
Good luck explaining not having google analytics to your client when a 3rd
party company begs you to add them so they can track their marketing
campaigns.

------
shirshak55
everybody should :D

------
rsyring
2017

------
technick
Why are we talking about a blog post from 2017?

~~~
saagarjha
I think this is a brusquely-worded request to put (2017) in the title.

------
insulfrable
Narrator: not enough...

------
awinter-py
everyone who understands how google is tracking them across the web hates it

------
going_to_800
It's from 2017 but even more valid today. GA is blocked by most ad blockers
thus no company can rely confidently on it anymore. uBlock blocks also a few
other tools like MixPanel that helps companies understand their users behavior
and how they use their product.

I can't believe how ignorant people that say "use server logs" are. They
clearly haven't done any online marketing or run an online business, yet they
want better and cheaper products - even free if possible.

How do you think a company gets to improve and optimize their product? By
surveys? I think many assume the entire analytics required for a business is
just reading a few GET requests from the server logs and categorizing them by
user agent.

~~~
Nextgrid
> They clearly haven't done any online marketing or run an online business

As far as I'm concerned online marketing is cancer. It acts against me, wastes
my time, etc. Marketing should be about presenting your product in the best
light possible, _and stop there_. You shouldn't be allowed to track or waste
other people's time to promote your product - being in business is not a right
after all.

> How do you think a company gets to improve and optimize their product? By
> surveys?

Yes exactly - companies were in business just fine for over a century and they
didn't have analytics, why should it suddenly be required?

~~~
going_to_800
I really hope one day you start your own online business and see how it's
actually run.

It's one thing you imagine a business should be run in an utopian world where
people respond to surveys and know exactly what they need to solve their
issues (Henry Ford said it perfectly "If I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses") and another thing how it works in real
world.

> Yes exactly - companies were in business just fine for over a century and
> they didn't have analytics, why should it suddenly be required?

This is a very ignorant response so I assume all your answers are the same.

> As far as I'm concerned online marketing is cancer.

I think you meant "advertising"... if yes, in some cases you're right.

~~~
Nextgrid
> This is a very ignorant response so I assume all your answers are the same.

If that is ignorant then I guess most companies founded in the 20th century
(without analytics, stalking and targeted advertising) must not be real then?
In fact I'd argue most of the money that funds the cancer that is modern
advertising, marketing, etc was made _before_ such things were actually
invented.

> I think you meant "advertising"

I kind of agree, and this is why I clarified _my_ definition of marketing. For
me, marketing is about putting your product in the best light possible on your
website (or physical space if you're into retail), so that people who stumble
upon your product (randomly or by searching for it) will be encouraged to buy
it.

The modern definition of marketing however seems to be stalking (aka
analytics), spam (newsletters, push notifications), creepy targeted
advertising (often relying on the previous items) and so on, essentially
forcing your product onto people who haven't asked anything. I consider this
modern marketing to be cancer.

