One possible benefit that I don't see discussed much in this context is bypassing ad blockers. I run a tech focused website and Google analytics registers about 10k visits/month. I figure that a good chunk of my visitors have ublock and so they don't show up. Presumably, alternative analytics or self hosted analytics are not blocked, so I'd get more accurate stats. Is this a correct assumption?
As I also said in another comment, you are correct in assuming, that you are bypassing ad blockers with this solution.
This solution takes your server log files and does an analysis/reporting based on that. As these log are written, when the browser accesses the resources (sites) you get clear stats oof how often your resources (sites/files) got requested.
As others stated nobody will filter out bots for you. So this will inflate the numbers with traffic from "none users". But also "adblock users" will show up.
As always - web stats are but an approximation of the real world. Their analysis depends on a lot of factors. From experience with different clients I know of cases were AdBlockers blocked up to 25% of traffic from showing up in analytics on sites with a more tech savvy audience.
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.
> 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.
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.
Bypassing ad-blockers is simple enough, just roll your own custom domain. I'm working on a blog post that covers how we (Fathom) did this with Caddy as a multi-region reverse proxy
