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Krister's coding adventures · May 18, 2020

Google Analytics lies.

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Krister Viirsaar · Krister's coding adventures

We all know that people use ad blockers and thus you probably have more visitors than the numbers show (solution: custom fetch request or server side analytics). Well today I found out Google Analytics with all it's amazing power isn't doing much to mitigate bots.

Check this out. On the 15th of May I was supposed to have 38 users.

I had put a custom fetch request into that page and sent the data to Bashboard.

    const previousVisit = localStorage.getItem('log-0-blog')
    if (!previousVisit) {
        localStorage.setItem('log-0-blog', true)
        fetch('https://bashboard.io/cpconf/users/funnel', {
            method: 'POST',
            body: JSON.stringify('0-blog')
        })
    }

15th of May actually had 20 visitors!

So either my localStorage trick is more faitful than Google Analytics megascript, or the problem is a lot of bots don't run fetch() commands. They do however run JS otherwise Google wouldn't see the visitor either.

If you know what's up with this - let me know in the comments (or IH comments).

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Read the original on code.krister.ee

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