ga-lite doesn't track when Google Analytics does ('Do not track' difference)

[Jos512]

Earlier this week I added ga-lite to my website and it worked. Or perhaps it seemed to work, because today it doesn't create a call to www.google-analytics.com. If I replace ga-lite with the Google Analytics JavaScript code, there is a call to www.google-analytics.com.

Ga-lite code

Code I tried:

<script>
window.galite=window.galite||function(){(galite.q=galite.q||[]).push(arguments)};
galite('create', 'UA-12345678-1');
galite('set', 'anonymizeIp', true);
galite('send', 'pageview');
</script>

// ...

<script async defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ga-lite@2.0.1/dist/ga-lite.min.js"></script>

And:

<script>
(function(e,t,n,i,s,a,c){e[n]=e[n]||function(){(e[n].q=e[n].q||[]).push(arguments)}
;a=t.createElement(i);c=t.getElementsByTagName(i)[0];a.async=true;a.src=s
;c.parentNode.insertBefore(a,c)
})(window,document,"galite","script","https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ga-lite@2/dist/ga-lite.min.js");

galite('create', 'UA-12345678-1', 'auto');
galite('send', 'pageview');
</script>

I do see that the script from cdn.jsdelivr.net loads in both Firefox and Chrome. But there isn't a resulting call to www.google-analytics.com to actually send the data to Google Analytics. (I of course verified that I don't have a browser setting that blocks requests to that address.)

I neither see an error message appearing in the 'Console' of the webdeveloper tools of Firefox and Chrome. (I tried both browsers.)

---

This issue does not only happen on my localhost test website. Here is a speedtest of Jehna's website that shows a HTTP connection error for the request to www.google-analytics.com. This is another speedtest for the same page, but this time from Melbourne. Here the connection error also shows.

I checked Google's Google Analytics status and there were no problems at this time.

---

Google Analytics

The issue does not happen with this:

<script>
    window.ga=window.ga||function(){(ga.q=ga.q||[]).push(arguments)};ga.l=+new Date;
    ga('create', 'UA-12345678-1', 'auto');
    ga('send', 'pageview');
    ga('set', 'anonymizeIp', true);
</script>

<script async defer src="https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js"></script>

For this code I see a call to Google Analytics:

https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&_v=j66&aip=1&a=1122917586&t=timing&_s=2&dl=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%2F&ul=nl&de=UTF-8.....

This happens to me in the same browser on the same computer, so I think we can rule out that my computer or browser has trouble connecting to www.google-analytics.com.

[jehna]

Hey

Thank you for the detailed bug report.

At least my own blog (running ga-lite latest version) seems to report analytics to Google normally (I don't see any decrease in statistics).

Pingdom's tool does not work properly with ga-lite (or better said with the Google's measurement protocol API). It was discussed in issue #50.

I can check further on the weekend. Could you double check that your browser does not have the "do not track" setting enabled?

So navigator.doNotTrack should be false.

[Jos512]

Thanks Jehna, it was indeed the 'do not track' setting. When I disable that option, ga-lite makes a call to www.google-analytics.com as expected.

I got confused here because the regular analytics.js file from Google Analytics themselves doesn't take that setting into consideration. (Which is actually a documented feature, so the project couldn't be doing it better. I just had to actually understand it. 😄 )

Thanks for your help!