People who block my tracking scripts don't want to be tracked, so I won't track them.
I use that info to see how people use a product, how they interact with it and what I can do to improve it. Where my time and money will be best spent.
If people want to block them, that's fine, I'm not going to try and get around them, but their "voice" is also muted here. I'm no longer factoring in their usage patterns, their usage at all.
I very well could, but I'm not going to find out. All it takes is one blogger somewhere to see that I collect stats like "70% of my visitors block tracking" and then the smear pieces start with wonderful headlines like "X tracks users that explicitly disabled tracking" and I lose a significant portion of my user base.
I've had it happen before, i'm not going to make the same mistake again.
It's kind of a hamfisted approach, but if you block tracking, i'm going to treat you like you don't exist. It's not that i'm trying to punish anyone, it's just that the analytics seems to be the ONLY reliable source of getting any kind of information about what people use. Surveys only reach an extremely small subset, or nobody at all (i've had them get a 0% response rate while there were tens of thousands of daily users), unsolicited feedback is almost 100% negative and a large percentage of it nonsensical (things like "I hate the new update"... What am I supposed to do with that?), requests for feedback on new features or changes might get a few good responses, but I have no way of comparing those responses with actual usage (especially when one gets linked on reddit and suddenly gets 10X the number of responses simply because it was linked on reddit). And then if you decide to go against what your 3 responses to a problem requested, you'll get more blog posts like "x asks for feedback, does whatever they want anyway". I'm sorry, but I'm done with that. I go by usage numbers and patterns only now.
People who block my tracking scripts don't want to be tracked, so I won't track them.
I use that info to see how people use a product, how they interact with it and what I can do to improve it. Where my time and money will be best spent.
If people want to block them, that's fine, I'm not going to try and get around them, but their "voice" is also muted here. I'm no longer factoring in their usage patterns, their usage at all.