The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build

Re:The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build by tombrossman on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:27PM (#13638449)

Remember that it's mandatory to disclose to visitors that your site uses Google Analytics in their T&C's https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html (section 7, 'Privacy'). I don't see a privacy policy on this Google employee's page but perhaps they have a special exemption?

Anyhow, for many websites you'll get more accurate traffic data with GoAccess parsing your logs and showing you page views and basic demographic data. Use it alongside Google Analytics if you must, to see the exact difference between what Google tells you your page views were versus what your server tells you.

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Re:The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build by peterhartree on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:34PM (#13638504)

> for many websites you'll get more accurate traffic data with GoAccess parsing your logs and showing you page views and basic demographic data

Yes but remember that bot traffic may be more of an issue when analysing server side logs (a lot of bots still don't execute JavaScript).

It's hard to know how effective the bot filtering features in GoAccess are compared with those of Google Analytics.

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Re:The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build by pierrefar on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:38PM (#13638542)

> a lot of bots still don't execute JavaScript

I operate a service that measures this (see another comment on this discussion), and all I'll say is you'll be very surprised how many bots actually execute JS, especially stealth bots. You have to be careful either way.

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Re:The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build by peterhartree on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:49PM (#13638627)

> all I'll say is you'll be very surprised how many bots actually execute JS

Interesting. Do you have any numbers you can share?

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Re:The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build by pierrefar on Monday February 13, 2017 @04:13PM (#13638833)

I don't have access to the raw log files from the customers, so can't give you a percentage. All I'll say confidently is that my service processes a lot of bot traffic that needs to be filtered out before reporting.

BTW, are you the same Peter Hartree on this Segment thread? https://community.segment.com/t/1889n1/how-common-is-client-... It would appear we've crossed paths before on this topic. Please do email me if you want to talk properly. That Segment thread has my email.

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Re:The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build by benologist on Monday February 13, 2017 @04:51PM (#13639116)

It's very easy to navigate sites programmatically including script execution:

http://zombie.js.org

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Re:The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build by tombrossman on Monday February 13, 2017 @03:38PM (#13638539)

There is an --ignore-crawlers option that works well for me. Next thing I'll try to get working is to have the --ignore-referer=<referer> option parse Piwik's referer spam blacklist https://github.com/piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist

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