We here at IT Nachos shoot your straight when it comes to technology and your business. In our search to teach and explain how technology can best affect your business we came across this situation a few times and wanted to convey our position:

Are you considering that many people are running ad blockers and those ad blockers have varying effects on your ability to capture web analytics?

Our experience has led us to encounter 3 basic schools of thought here – 1. Since they don’t want to be counted, don’t count them. This means your web data becomes increasingly inaccurate, or better yet you don’t even know the true impact of this audience segment. 2. Let’s add something else on the site that will allow us to capture a cookie of some sort and we can count that. This is good, but for sites not that advanced or with limited budget this is prohibitive – also it depends on conversion or ‘opting in’ via the cookie. 3. We can count the number of times our page comes up and the Google Analytic (And/or) Google Tag Manager fires.

A minute to consider…

Considerations: Compliance, Privacy Policy, Business Goals, Budget, Expertise, Audience

We lean towards letting data make our decision – so that generally means putting in place #2 mentioned above so we can even know how many people we are talking about. This allows for the scale and scope of the ad blocking audience to be known without capturing any additional information that causes compliance and policy conflicts. Win, Win.

And that is where the magic happens

How to capture hits that are programatically being rejected – simply by sending a call to google-analytics.com?!

Marthijn Hoiting does this all in a clear concise tutorial here:

This method allows for PHP to make console log messages that are then captured and converted into local server-side images, thus ‘hacking’ the call to google-analytics.com – Again, Marthijn says it best in this quote:

The solution is using PHP. What we are doing is loading an server side generated image with javascript if we detect someone have disabled Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager. Our uBlock software doesn’t detect it as an tracker.

So although this is complex and can cause the spread of incorrect information if you are not counting your site visits properly – We can make it easy. We can give you the assurance that you have a partner looking out for your businesses best interest. Again, this is better had as a conversation and…

We would love to continue this conversation with you

Shoot us a note below and we will contact you about getting more accurate with your web analytics.

Thanks!
IT Nachos Support