You can exfiltrate the data via an http request or websocket and have your server submit the pageview hit directly to GA's servers. For me, this makes GA unique visitors numbers about 89% of Cloudflare's.

For this specific application, it's a game (digdig.io), so these 11% might likely be browsers that didn't fully connect to the game, or bots that don't fully support the apis I'm using.

> For this specific application, it's a game (digdig.io), so these 11% might likely be browsers that didn't fully connect to the game, or bots that don't fully support the apis I'm using.

...or people that simply refuse to correctly resolve google analytics' domains, or people who simply block google analytics' IP addresses at the firewall level...

And you know why people do that? Probably because there are developers out there that think it is a good idea to "exfiltrate the data via an http request or websocket and have your server submit the pageview hit directly to GA's servers".

I don't think you read properly. Simply blocking GA domains won't do anything. Open the website, there isn't a single request to GA. The data is collected when the game starts and sent to the game server which sends it to GA. The 11% is not caused by client side blocking.

Also, I don't care if you don't want some VERY basic info about your browser collected. If you're connecting to my servers, you already gave it to me through the headers, I'm giving it to GA too.

I think it's about developing better log analysis tools. GoAccess does a pretty good job but it's missing a couple of features that would make me entirely stop using GA. Namely: stats over time, and better source grouping.

Even events can be replaced by triggering calls to your own endpoints.