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When I developed my Minimal Google Analytics 4 snippet, I thought about preventing it from being blocked by various AdBlockers.
Along with AdBlock Plus, I am also using the DuckDuckGo Privacy Protection extension in Safari. I am using the DuckDuckGo browser on its own as well.
DuckDuckGo, along with restrictive ad blockers, tends to block requests heading to the google-analytics.com domain. This is done on purpose, and I fully understand that.
This is why I described mitigation techniques (Minimal Analytics 4 - masking (hiding) requests).
This technique allows you to utilize Redirect 200 to mask requests to external domains under your domain.
By implementing a redirect as follows:
/g/collect https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect 200
Instead of calling the address below in a script
https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect
I am calling this
https://www.example.com/g/collect
Behind the scenes, thanks to Redirect 200, I am sending requests to Google Analytics that are not blocked by either AdBlock Plus or DuckDuckGo.
This solution, however, has 2 major flaws.
If you follow my page, you’ve probably already come across my post Blocking Ads in Safari on iOS, iPadOS and macOS. In it, I described how to use the built-in Firefox Focus feature to block trackers and ads without unnecessary configuration.
This method won’t work for everyone. Others may opt for AdBlock Plus, which can be set to block ads in Safari similarly to the method described using Firefox Focus. Daily I use Firefox Focus and AdBlock Plus in my Safari browser on my phone.
No matter what you choose, every solution is good with one but…
We are living in a world, where everybody is trying to commercialise almost everything. If selling products and services does not bring desired income and users have had already too many subscriptions to pay for another one, there’s comes Ads.
Nobody likes Ads. They can ruin the reading experience on the website, cause our computer to choke due to excessive use of resources, or put your device or ourselves at risk due to privacy matters.
I used to use, back in 2020 ads, that display dynamically on my site, through Google AdSense. This does not even bring the return of the costs, that I put into it. What’s more annoying, using Google Ads has a huge negative impact on my website performance. Ironically, my site has been penalised by Google in their ranking, due to using their solution!
Once I migrated to Hugo and start using Netlify in their free plan, I reduced costs significantly, and because of that, I decided to banish Ads altogether. My site doesn’t have millions of visitors per month, hence it does not cost me a lot to maintain it. At the time, when I will be somehow noticed, I will gain a decent number of visitors, can imagine that I will be facing other opportunities to gain profit, and hopefully this will not be from Ads.
When I appreciate Ads system like EthicalAds, Privacy-preserving Ad Network or BuySellAds, there are still Ad systems that cause me a headache. If they annoy me, they annoy others as well.
On my devices, I am using Safari as my default browser. You may say what you like about it, but definitely, it’s not the new Internet Explorer.
I am using a dual approach. To preserve my privacy and to remove annoyances from the websites that I visit every day. Here is how I am doing that on my devices.
You may say what you want about Google Analytics, especially about how “they” are, apart from displaying data for you, using data gathered for “their” business purpose (forget about privacy). If you are a website owner and you are looking for a reasonable tracking method for your visitors, this is the solution that you will pick in the first place.
The problem with Google Analytics is that their tracking script weights a lot and that is slowing down your website.
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