[sofixa]

> I'm about to give you money. That's the only 'analytic' you should care about

Yeah, but who are you? Are you an impulse buyer? Returning? Did you spend an hour on the product page? Did you jump between 20 different product pages?

You can't deny that this kind of analytics can be very useful for user conversion and website design. And the site in question tries to do the proper thing, checking if GA works before trying to do stuff with it, so it wouldn't just fail if GA was blocked by the user.

[mitchdoogle]

I always try to just these things based on physical analogies. The clear analog for visiting an ecommerce store is walking into a physical store with a shopping cart. Maybe the physical store has cameras or some other way they track people. In any case they probably aren't watching every single customer to determine which aisles they walk down, if they pick up an item without putting it in their cart, etc. Let's say they are doing that though, for the sake of analogy. It's strange to me that people are ok with that, but let's move on..

Now, since an adblocker doesn't change anything anywhere except on the end user's computer, the analog should be something on the customer's person, or some part of their behavior. So let's say the customer tries to avoid identification by wearing a hat, and they purposely grab every item and put it back on the shelf to mess with the data about their shopping habits.

Do you think it makes sense for the cashier to refuse to checkout anyone who is wearing a hat? Or if they spotted someone who picked a few things up without putting them in their cart?

Because I sure don't.

[ookware]

That's great, but all of that tracking is pointless if I can't actually complete the sale

[rchaud]

That's not on TeeSpring, that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy. The user is running code on their local machine that breaks his/her own ability to complete the sale.

[matheusmoreira]

> that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. The blocker does it because just deleting the object would let obnoxious websites to detect its presence and punish users for it.

The better question is why their checkout completely breaks because of this. Their reliance on Google spyware is 100% on them and they are losing sales because of it.

[robben1234]

Modifying client code (especially with an addon you do not control) and then complaining to the original code owner when functionality stop working is wrong.

Analytics and ads are annoying, I get it. However if you use an automated script to clear them out, be aware that some things might brake.

If Ublock Origin devs think they need to replace GA with a dummy to stop tracking they should've put a copy of the original interface with empty functions into it so the flow doesn't throw exceptions when the app tries to use it thinking everything's fine. Those scripts are publicly available and aren't a secret.

[veeti]

It's not a very good dummy then as it's trivial to detect. PoC already exists in TFA.

[KeepFlying]

That's on the site for requiring tracking to be successful in order to take my money.

They shouldn't require tracking to succeed in order for me to buy the product. If they want tracking, sure. But be resistant to it erroring out. Don't let errors in 3rd party tools prevent your user from getting their core goals completed.

The same goes for client apps. Don't crash the app if it fails to log to a file. Don't crash the app if it can't sync your cache. Etc, etc. Don't let these unnecessary conveniences get in the users way.

[JulianMorrison]

If your site put a selfish arrogant tracker in the way of completing the order... then you lost the sale. And the customer, who won't be coming back. I don't give a good god-damn about how it's "part of the site". It's not part of the transaction, and you put it there, and it broke things.

[shadowgovt]

And practically speaking, the back-stop is that if uBlock Origin causes too many high-profile websites to break, it'll get a reputation for degrading user experience and fewer users will install it.

When two independently-owned systems on the web break each other, "who needs to fix their stuff" is a question more of social networks and business politics than technology. TeeSpring's "fix" could be to pop a banner that says "WARNING: uBlock Origin breaks this site and we can't test for that."

[inetknght]

> TeeSpring's "fix" could be to pop a banner that says "WARNING: uBlock Origin breaks this site and we can't test for that."

That'd be great. Then I, as a user of uBlock Origin, can nope-out of the site before wasting too much of my time and the site's resources.

[OldTimeCoffee]

That's not how it ends up working, though. People just share screenshots or tell friends of the broken website and people stop using the website not uBO.

And there are sites that will throw up a banner that says 'Adblockers might break this, if you have problems disable your Adblocker and try again' which is pretty effective. Funny enough, in my experience, sites with that banner tend to work with uBO enabled (probably because they're testing it).

[FalconSensei]

The checkout shouldn't rely on GA.

Tracking should rely on the tracking service, not the checkout process

[LaGrange]

> Yeah, but who are you?

I am none of your business.

[sofixa]

You, personally, are not. You, one of a cohort, kind of are.

If i run an e-commerce site, and see the vast majority of my users, but the minority of those that buy stuff, are on mobile and from India, maybe i need to optimise my site for mobile and lower-speed connections? Maybe something is wrong with my payment for specific currencies?

If i run a blog, ans the majority of my viewers come from France, maybe it's time i start writing localised content in French?

You get the gist.

[pseudalopex]

You can see those things with just server logs.

[sofixa]

No, you can't. There's no way to get viewport from server logs, and presenting them a form digestible by marketing people isn't easy.

[throwaddzuzxd]

And for all of that, you need GA because...?

[sofixa]

Because it's easy and marketing people can work with it. Access logs don't have all the information ( e.g. viewport) and are cumbersome to parse.

[LaGrange]

I get the gist, you believe you’re so bad at running a shop and/or writing you can’t survive without creeping on people.

Also, look at both of your examples. They’re bad. They’re both best replied to with that diagram of holes on a WW2 airplane.

[jfengel]

If you're trying to buy from me, who you are is literally my business.

[KeepFlying]

What I buy from you is your business. The information I give you to complete my transaction is your business.

Who I am is not.

You don't need to know if I have kids, have a disease, my age, my race, my gender. You don't need to know anything. Sure that information would help you make a better experience for me, I get that. But that's up to me. If I want a better experience, allow me to provide that information in exchange for the benefits that information gains me. But peeking over my shoulder as I walk through your store so that you can overanalyze everything I do isn't okay.

[hire_charts]

And I'll happily fill out a form to tell you any information I feel is relevant to my purchase. If you want to covertly fingerprint and track me, I'll gladly take my business elsewhere.

[LaGrange]

No it's not. My shipping and payment details might be, if I decide to buy anything. Those are not the same as "who I am."

[bruce343434]

> this kind of analytics can be very useful for user conversion and website design

Excuse my ignorance on web development, but why? How?

[toast0]

Well done analytics can give the tracker a lot of information about if the user got there from marketting or other outreach, what they did on the site, and if they took some action that's important to the site operator (buying something, creating an account, posting, logging in, whatever), and what page was the last thing they did before they left.

If you're selling stuff, and you notice a lot of people going partway through your checkout process and leaving, it might be a sign that something in the process isn't user friendly and improvement could benefit you. Especially if the behavior has changed recently.

You might see that people come in from a marketting link where you thought they'd like to buy A, but they rarely buy A, and if they do buy something, they buy B; maybe it would make sense to use that link to go to the sales page for B instead, etc.

You could even notice that people who don't run your javascript analytics still add things to the cart, and start the checkout, but never finish, and take that as something to investigate.

This isn't a defense of Google Analytics in specific, or javascript analytics in general, this could be done serverside with just a cookie to corellate across multiple visits, or a session cookie within the same visit, or instrumenting all the links and correlating that way. Javascript could be used to remove tracking tags for copying links, but have it when clicked; great if it works, not the end of the world if it doesn't.

[gpvos]

It provides work for your marketing and sales people.