The 2 main things that limit the number of people you track are:

Depending on the profile of your visitors these things alone, can stop you from tracking more than half of your visitors. In this episode of Growth Detectives show I am going to tell you how you can prevent that from happening.

So, let's start with consent banners.

The truth is that privacy laws in over 60 countries require that website owners ask their visitors for consent before tracking. This consent should be given by clicking a button in a consent banner. Unfortunately, a big portion of visitors do not do that. And as a result, they cannot be tracked.

So what to do about it? Should you just disrespect that and risk being fined?

There is a better solution.

The thing is you need to ask visitors for consent only when you want to track personal information about them and / or use techniqies that can identify them. One of them is cookies, from hich the banners took their name. However there are in fact many more of them.

So what to do about it?

Do not use a tracking tool, that tries to identify your visitors or collect their personal information. As simple as that.

Then, you won't have to ask visitors for consent and will be able to track many more visits (although a little bit less accurately).

This is because ad blockers actually not only block Ads themselves, but also prevent tracking. 

They do it either by blocking scripts from specific sources (like Google Analytics) or by stoping them from sending data to specific domains (like Google's).

However, there are 3 ways to make it more difficult for them:

let's start with the server-side tracking.

The way it works is simple. Instead of sending traffic information directly to the tracking platform, the information is sent to your server and only then to the server of the tracking tool.

The downside of this, however, is that your server has some additional work and may require an upgrade.

Next we have local file hosting.

In this case, the tracking script is not loaded from the domain of the tracking tool, but directly from your own server. Sometimes they are also renamed to cheat ad blockers. The downside of this solution, is that only few ad blckers can be cheated this way and the tracking file needs to be frequently updated.

Last but not least, we have file domain proxying. In this case, the tracking file is still kept on the server of the tracking tool, but ad blockers believe that it is in fact hosted on your own server. This technique however has the the smallest impact of these three.

So, what solutions should you use to track as much visitors as possible?

Definitely a tool that does not require visitors consent and - if possible - offer server side tracking option.

And these are all the solutions you can use  to maximize the number of visitors that your website tracks. Thank you.