My assumptions are that:
- client-side will under report, because users opt out or block JS and cookies
- server-side will over report, because of bots, crawlers, etc.
I was thinking that combining both in a dashboard can give clients a sense that the reality will be somewhere in the middle. Obviously there's a limit to how many metrics can be measured by both systems to enable this comparison, but I'm thinking the basics should be possible. Are my assumptions about over- and under-reporting right?
Does anyone do anything like this and how do you do it?
And are there any metrics that help us understand how much traffic is being missed by, for example, Google Analytics these days? Many clients still assume that it gives a 100% gospel representation.
if analytics tracking is imperative to measurement of your site and there's little to no profiling (lean toward no profiling) you can typically get your endpoints/domains removed from blacklists by simply submitting a pr with your reasoning. if you have examples even better. if you're profiling a user and need real-time engagements to sell impressions/advertising to that user based on site behavior then i think you're just SOL.
a roundabout solution could be to store events on the client and attach them to some user entity. maybe some queue of action entities of time, type, and any sort of payload. at the end of the session or maybe when you're updating the user entity, you can process those queued events as you normally would.
idk if these are great solutions, but hope it sparks some ideas for you and your team.