AdBlockers hide the majority of visitors from web analytics
I used Mixpanel analytics to tell me how many people are reading my articles. Recently I implemented my custom analytics. I was astonished when my custom analytics showed me more than twice the number of page views than the numbers from Mixpanel. AdBlock was hiding sixty per cent of my site’s visitors from Mixpanel.
Everyone who publishes on the internet loves analytics. It’s a big part of the writing feedback process. That’s why I included analytics on this blog. I decided to use Mixpanel because I value my user’s privacy. As far as I was able to tell, Mixpanel is not using the captured user data for advertisement. I only wanted to know that someone visited my blog; I didn’t need all the detailed user demographic you get from Google Analytics.
MixPanel is a terrific tool, but the free plan only allows for a thousand monthly users. When I published my Zettelkasten article, I exceeded my limit by order of magnitude. The plan that would handle small bursts of traffic like that would cost me $400 a month, a clear overkill for my humble blog. So I decided to create my custom analytics.
