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Many tech savvy people know and talk about Ad Block. It became vastly popular only when Firefox came about. There were other ad blockers prior to that but were a hassle to use, forcing you to setup a loopback proxy.
Now with Firefox extensions, it only takes 3-4 clicks to install, and once you’ve done so, you don’t have to do it again every time you boot up your computer.
You have probably heard about how prevalent ad blocking has become, and Google Analytics gives you a nice way to look at it.
65% of Reddit Users have Ad Block
62% of Visitors not from Reddit have Adblock
Now these results aren’t perfect but they are close. Here are the two caveats.
- Doesn’t include people who have blocked analytics. These are usually crawlers and bots anyway.
- Visits aren’t always 1 page. But for this website its very close to 1. The same thing for unique visitors.
And on a somewhat related note, here is a bizzare Analytics glitch I found.
One strange thing I often see is that Google will list the time spent on site as 0. Maybe the person has Javascript disabled. But 0 visits? I don’t see a beta tag anywhere.
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AFAIK, this glitch is due to the way analytics attributes the visit count. Assume the user who made that query also made another search, before that one. Then if both received a visit count of 1, then the sum the visits column would be more than the real total visits.
To prevent this, GA only gives the first search a visit count… somewhat understandable, but it leads to this weirdness.
Thanks for clearing it up Mike.
I block Anal-ytics. Cause hey, y’know google? Fuck those guys.
As it happens, I block Analytics too, and with NoScript, it’s as effortless as Adblock. Ghostery is even more active in this area.
Adbard is a new advertising network for free software sites and products, I see a lot of people on my site, Libre.fm who are willing to unblock the ads because of their relevancy.
Google Adwords doesn’t have this.
I have google-analytics.com redirected to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts (along with a dozen other sites) since I got sick of it adding that little bit of time to almost every page load. I also use AdBlock Plus.
the data is wrong. If google doesn’t have any ads to show you don’t get an impression. It is common to not sell all the impressions on a site due to lack of advertisers.
That might be the case for a small advertising network, but as you might see (if you have ad block off) that there is no shortage of advertisers.
Also, Ad Sense doesn’t pay per impression, it pays per click.
Okay, I probably totally missed this, but how do I determine or even guestimate how many people are using ad blocking on my sites in Analytics? I don’t see any reports that point this out but, again, I could be totally missing something from the article above.
Cheers!