| I do marketing ops consulting and see this stuff all the time. First, let's get two things out of the way: 1. Yes, Google Analytics can be quite useless if you keep default settings with no configuration. 2. That doesn't mean you should jump straight to a self-hosted solution, or a paid solution, or throw up your hands and say "it'll never be accurate." For most use cases, GA is more than good enough to measure effectiveness of online marketing efforts. Dismissing it outright in favor of a paid or self-hosted option just because you didn't google "how to prevent analytics hijacking" is bad decision-making. /rant Now on to the fix... You can create a filter in your GA view settings to ignore tracking calls from any hostname other than your own. See here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033162?hl=en PS - No client-side analytics will ever be 100% accurate, certainly not GA. But for the purposes of measuring marketing efforts and results, you can have greater tolerances. It's a tool for marketing, not logging. |