A lot of people are using adblockers today and I understand why people do it. Nearly all third party trackers are or can easily be blocked by todays adblockere.<p>That limits the ways to track users and we should respect that, but I think the problem is only for thirdparty tracking, I don't think people have a problem with that the main website tracks usage.<p>That brings back memories like AWstats that analyses logs to figure out which are the most popular pages.
http://www.awstats.org/<p>But is that the future? I think so, but I have not seen anybody else talk about it. It is not as sexy and it requires a lot more to install than simply copy-and-pasting a javascript snippet, but it can't be blocked!<p>What do you think? Would love to hear your opinion!
I never actually did the math to look how much money i loose / how many percent actually use a adblock. But i've also seen people who use AdBlock but allow Analytics or have no AdBlock but something like Ghostery. So i am pretty sure the numbers are always wrong.<p>But next to Analytics i am a big fan of GoAccess (<a href="http://goaccess.io/" rel="nofollow">http://goaccess.io/</a>) which also can do HTML exports if you prefer that over their very well done TUI.<p>The cool thing is there is basically no install because it just parses the access logs. It supports multiple formats and i even use it with a rails app (i probably simply changed the log format to something more standard tho). You just throw the binary on the server you just need it on and point to the log file.<p>Edit:// I just checked a old blog targeting people with security in mind. It suggests about 80% analytics blocking O_O<p>Also i we use Kibana (<a href="https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana" rel="nofollow">https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana</a>) at work which coubled with Logstash and other software can be a very mightly log analyzer. But you have to do the configuration yourself.
I have only one site where I have access to server logs, (I think). I am using Smugmug to host my photos. Their stats exclude my logged in sessions.<p>So I have about 1700 pageviews under SmugMug stats whereas only 63 pageviews on Google Analytics this month. GA shows only 24 sessions. Smugmug doesn't have sessions info. It is kind of hard to believe that so many people are using AdBlockers but I guess that is the future.<p>But since Smugmug doesn't provide sessions info, it is possible that there were a few people with AdBlocker are responsible for most of the views under Smugmug stats.
You can either create your own tracking solution, load one via 3rd party, or load a 3rd party via your own domain making it seem 1st party.<p>In general tho, most systems use a lot of JavaScript, and you'll need to figure out how to best capture the data and record it. Depending on the volume of traffic, you could easily create pretty sizable amounts of data.<p>I help do this kind of work, at work, and you need to realize you'll never get 1 to 1 data for all visitors, but you should try to get as large a sample as possible and use statistical reasoning when discussing issues.