Your New Google Analytics Install
You’ve gone through the painstaking work of setting up your Google Analytics account, installing Google Analytics in your shopping cart, configuring exclusion settings and the like. Next up, you test a transaction from search engine through order process and checkout, see the transaction show up, and are feeling pretty good. You look through the data and the navigation you just did while testing and it makes sense. So far, so good. Rinse, repeat for one or two more. OK, you wait for the new orders from a new day with fresh orders place by other people forging their own path through your site and are looking forward to a bit of fresh Sherlock tracking work on new, unfamiliar evidence.
Wait, you have 20 new orders that a definitely real, since you see the actual credit card transactions and the money is on its way. But Google Analytics insists that you’ve only done 15 transactions on the day. What gives? Were these ghost orders? Well, there’s money in my account, so that’s my kind of ghost.
There are actually quite a few suspects as to who’s responsible for these ninja orders that sneak in, buy product and pay for it, but are in and gone without GA noticing them. Let’s start with Ad Blockers.
Prime suspect: Cue the Ad Blocker
Most popular ad blockers can block Google Analytics tracking, either by default or an easy toggle on installation. If properly installed, your visitor is blocking ads, you usually do not know much about these visitors. Usually really nothing, not even the fact that this user visited your website/cart.
Install of Adblock Plus:
Additionally, there are in-browser features not requiring any install (e.g., Firefox Private Browsing/Tracking Protection) which will block GA.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/11/03/firefox-now-offers-a-more-private-browsing-experience/
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AD BLOCKER |
Is GA allowed by default? |
Is GA easily blocked on install? |
|
AdBlock |
Yes |
Yes |
|
AdBlock Plus |
Yes |
Yes |
|
AdBlock Pro |
Yes |
Yes |
|
AdGuard AdBlocker |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Ad Muncher |
No |
Yes |
|
AdRemover |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Ghostery |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Simply Block Ads! |
Yes |
No |
|
SuperBlock Adblocker |
Yes |
Yes |
|
μ Adblock |
Yes |
Yes |
|
μBlock Origin |
No |
|
The Numbers
According to a PageFair study, 10-40% of all requests to Google Analytics are being blocked by ad blockers or various extensions. Since Google Analytics is the de facto standard for web analytics with 65% market share, it is a large target and increasingly blocked by ad blockers. As desktop web traffic has declined with much traffic migrating to mobile, the use of adblock software continues to grow, regardless:
How do Ad Blockers work?
When a browser requests a website address it downloads the corresponding HTML file which includes internal & external references to Javascript files, CSS stylesheets and images. If the browser has an ad blocker installed, it will compare the names of referenced scripts & files against a “block list” and if there are any matches those files will be ignored. Most ad blockers list www.google-analytics.com by default, and when configured to block Google Analytics, they will block any attempts by the Google Analytics JavaScript library to send or retrieve the data from its analytics servers.
How do you beat an Ad Blocker for GA?
One solution: Browser side “Proxy Approach”
A VERY broad description of the proxy approach.
- First, downloadthe Google Analytics JavaScript library itself and host it on your server.
- Then change the target host from google-analytics.comto your own domain name using find-replace.
- Replace the link from the default Google Analytics script to point to your self-hosted javascript library.
- Create a proxyendpoint to Google Analytics servers on your back end.
Essentially you’re substituting the javascript library on your own server so that the blacklist becomes ineffective, then you’re sending the data by proxy to google for matching.
Next Lesson: “Server Side” Solution. Stay tuned!