[dmkii]

It’s true, but GA also does a pretty good job at filtering out bot traffic for example, so it depends on what your definition of more accurate is. There are also ways to send GA hits through a sub domain to make it look self hosted and bypass ad blockers.

[chance_state]

>There are also ways to send GA hits through a sub domain to make it look self hosted and bypass ad blockers.

This doesn't work anymore. uBlock Origin, Pi-Hole, and many others do CNAME inspection to uncover the true host.

[markdown]

> It’s true, but GA also does a pretty good job at filtering out bot traffic for example

Surely you jest. I had to quit using GA because the tech behemoth with all it's tens of thousands of software and algo experts couldn't figure out how to filter out referrer spam from their analytics.

Such a simple problem you'd think they'd solve it in a day. I gave them 2yrs and they still couldn't solve that problem so I left.

[Hedja]

The strange thing for me is, when I switched to custom first-party analytics, I stopped getting referrer spam altogether. I assume then that spammers explicitly optimise for GA tracking and ignore everything else. Which makes sense since a lot of them are targeting audiences that care about SEO and GA has a uniform tracking URL that they can flood without the cost of rendering webpages. The reason GA can't filter them out is because they're constantly working around each other.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Parent speaks the truth. I quit because of the garbage referers coming out of Russia that Google would do nothing about.

[esperent]

How do you know they were garbage?

[markdown]

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22buttons-for-websites%22+r...

[0xADEADBEE]

You can inline the JS to achieve this. ublock will allow you to prevent inline JS execution but NoScript didn't last I checked