You can track without JavaScript, but you can't just include a 3rd party service, you actually have to do the work.
Same thing for ads, JavaScript isn't required (especially for text ads, although few networks will let you do server side ad requests)
No, you can still do a 3rd pay service without JavaScript. GA expressly supports it.
Re:The Website Obesity Crisis
by userbinator on Friday January 01, 2016 @05:15AM
(#10821535)
Tracking can absolutely be done without JS, although the granularity of the data is bigger; these have been around ever since the very beginning of the Web:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon
Re:The Website Obesity Crisis
by madeofpalk on Thursday December 31, 2015 @09:57PM
(#10820942)
Not necessarily - a lot of the time it's just laziness and incompetence.
No Javascript => no tracking/ads => force users to enable JS and (sometimes) disable their adblocker. It's all about money, never about technology.