
Ask HN: What about site statistics when people are using adblocker? - kevinsimper
A lot of people are using adblockers today and I understand why people do it. Nearly all third party trackers are or can easily be blocked by todays adblockere.<p>That limits the ways to track users and we should respect that, but I think the problem is only for thirdparty tracking, I don&#x27;t think people have a problem with that the main website tracks usage.<p>That brings back memories like AWstats that analyses logs to figure out which are the most popular pages.
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.awstats.org&#x2F;<p>But is that the future? I think so, but I have not seen anybody else talk about it. It is not as sexy and it requires a lot more to install than simply copy-and-pasting a javascript snippet, but it can&#x27;t be blocked!<p>What do you think? Would love to hear your opinion!
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herbst
I never actually did the math to look how much money i loose / how many
percent actually use a adblock. But i've also seen people who use AdBlock but
allow Analytics or have no AdBlock but something like Ghostery. So i am pretty
sure the numbers are always wrong.

But next to Analytics i am a big fan of GoAccess
([http://goaccess.io/](http://goaccess.io/)) which also can do HTML exports if
you prefer that over their very well done TUI.

The cool thing is there is basically no install because it just parses the
access logs. It supports multiple formats and i even use it with a rails app
(i probably simply changed the log format to something more standard tho). You
just throw the binary on the server you just need it on and point to the log
file.

Edit:// I just checked a old blog targeting people with security in mind. It
suggests about 80% analytics blocking O_O

Also i we use Kibana
([https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana](https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana))
at work which coubled with Logstash and other software can be a very mightly
log analyzer. But you have to do the configuration yourself.

~~~
kevinsimper
Thank you for that sweet reply!

Yes you are right, there is so many combinations and as you found out a lot of
people are using adblockers!

I did not know about goaccess, that looks really cool! I will check that out!

The problem with analyzing logs is that it is difficult to track unique visits
purely from logs. Also differentiating bots that tries to look like real
humans.

Kibana and logstash is awesome, but it is not the easiest to setup if you
compare it to Google Analytics.

~~~
herbst
Yeah i figured at least 20% of my 80% are bots. If not more. And you are
right, without Javascript its not really possible to have detailed
informations like with Analytics. Following the user around should be possible
with the usual access logs, but i have yet to find a software that supports
this, and i can imagine its hard to create as there are so many different
combinations of everything.

Its really interesting to think about. I can see no solution for this, just
how it will get worse and worse over time. People are more and more scared
about Trackers and block them sometimes in way to consequent ways, hence i
even had users complaining about a broken design when they had some browser
extension which __removed __every element containing social media names in the
tags. Something like <section id="why-i-hate-facebook"> is appearantly not
acceptable for some.

~~~
kevinsimper
I only really see three solutions:

One is creating a service that uses a sdk that works into whatever webserver
you are using and then slightly alters your html to input different detection
methods. That would make it impossible to block or possible to detect a block.
(index.html was loaded, but .js was not)

Allowing a tracker to be served from a subdomain. This way it is not
thirdparty and should be okay.

Analytics over websockets.

\---

But it will not be easy and will probably be a weapons race with adblockers.

The problem is really only with thirdparty trackers, that when have data
across multiple sites can make a much deeper profile about you than a single
site can make without you allowing it.

So if we can convince everybody about that, that would be great!

~~~
herbst
I was going to write about how one could fix this with CNAME'ing the
tracker/ad services and beeing able to choose custom file names. AFAIK most
blockers just block requests based on patterns and not actually look at the
DOM (sure some do, but those are paranoid fuckers anyway).

You are right that the profile it creates can be scary, and honestly i block
everything i can. I just happen to think about the business side as well.

Remember when we tracked with images? I dont even remember why, but in the
early days all we did was a 1x1 image. Piwik even still supports tracking
images, i dont know how good the data can get that way tho.

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amerkhalid
I have only one site where I have access to server logs, (I think). I am using
Smugmug to host my photos. Their stats exclude my logged in sessions.

So I have about 1700 pageviews under SmugMug stats whereas only 63 pageviews
on Google Analytics this month. GA shows only 24 sessions. Smugmug doesn't
have sessions info. It is kind of hard to believe that so many people are
using AdBlockers but I guess that is the future.

But since Smugmug doesn't provide sessions info, it is possible that there
were a few people with AdBlocker are responsible for most of the views under
Smugmug stats.

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fenier
You can either create your own tracking solution, load one via 3rd party, or
load a 3rd party via your own domain making it seem 1st party.

In general tho, most systems use a lot of JavaScript, and you'll need to
figure out how to best capture the data and record it. Depending on the volume
of traffic, you could easily create pretty sizable amounts of data.

I help do this kind of work, at work, and you need to realize you'll never get
1 to 1 data for all visitors, but you should try to get as large a sample as
possible and use statistical reasoning when discussing issues.

