You may have installed the simple analytics script on your website, but it's not working or showing visitors in the dashboard due to adblockers.
Ad blockers are software applications or browser extensions that block or filter online advertisements. They prevent ads from being displayed on websites, improving the browsing experience for users.
Sometimes ad blockers block our privacy-friendly Simple Analytics script, unfortunately. To get around websites visitor with ad blockers, we recommend installing a custom domain.
We assume you don’t have a custom domain set up for this guide.
Let’s dive in!
If your dashboard looks like the image below, then you know there's no data coming in yet. If you see visitors or page views, everything is correct, and you are good to go.
For this guide, we use the example website of Bløf.com.
So why is it not showing visitors? A common case where it doesn't work is when you have an ad blocker enabled.
First, we need to find out if you installed the embed script correctly. To do this, follow these steps:
- If you go to your website (or, in this case, bløf.com)
- Right-click on your website
- Click on “inspect”
You’ll see a menu opening. If you go to the network tab, you will see an empty page. That's because the network tab has only been opened when the page has been loaded. So let's refresh the website.
You’ll see something like the image below.
This “latest JS” is our embed script. If you look under “Status,” it says “(blocked:other).” This usually means that an extension blocks it.
We should turn off the ad blocker to check if our script is installed correctly. Let's refresh and see what happens.
In the image above, I’ve refreshed the page, and now we see that our embed script “latest js” is loading correctly. It has a green status icon when you click on it.
We should see some data if we go back to our dashboard.
This is a frequent scenario where users believe the analytics isn't working, when in fact, the issue arises due to the presence of an ad blocker.