Ad Blockers Are Also Changing the Game for SaaS and Web Developers

Re:Ad Blockers Are Also Changing the Game for SaaS and Web D... by EvilMonkeyMat on Thursday October 29, 2015 @04:12PM (#10473933)

With ad blockers, user tracking gets harder and harder, and this sucks when you want to understand the effects of changes on your own website, such as changing user menus, moving content blocks from a position to another, or even to a different page, etc. The value of partnerships with other websites gets harder to evaluate too.

Hosting my websites on Linux environments, I never stopped using server-side generated statistics (based on Apache's access logs) with tools like AWStats. Used together, I feel that client and server-side stats give a much better image of what really happens on my websites.

But in the end, I feel awstats isn't enough, and I'll take a look at other solutions that have been pointed out in these comments. Thanks!

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Re:Ad Blockers Are Also Changing the Game for SaaS and Web D... by rando3826 on Thursday October 29, 2015 @07:26PM (#10475192)

Is Apache reporting back to the apache foundation about how you are using your apache software? Maybe your expectations about user tracking are the problem.

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Re:Ad Blockers Are Also Changing the Game for SaaS and Web D... by EvilMonkeyMat on Thursday October 29, 2015 @08:38PM (#10475499)

I'm pretty sure they aren't, but I must admit, I have never checked. I supposed that would be known by now... One thing is sure, access logs are located on my own VM, and are processed locally by awstats. The only thing that binds requests to an actual user is the IP address, and one must contact ISPs to have more information. I don't have the authority to do that.

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