Top all-time · #4534
Simo Ahava
Personal blog · simoahava.comwebdata
Simo Ahava's personal blog at simoahava.com covers web and data. Since 2017, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Intelligent Tracking Prevention In iOS 14, iPadOS 14, And Safari 14”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Simo Ahava's posts on Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and web tracking are linked as practical references for GTM/GA setup, loader customisation, and analytics privacy and browser changes.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Simo Ahava is a Google Developer Expert for Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. This is a blog all about web analytics development.
Most-linked posts?
- Intelligent Tracking Prevention In iOS 14, iPadOS 14, And Safari 142 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-17
What Hacker News says?
it will be called differently indeed, it's already there: https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server...
Comment linking /analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server-side-tagging/
on “Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)”Submitted No, Safari 14 does not block Google Analytics as a story · 250 points
HN discussionyou can also change the ressources names: https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server... and you can host the container on your own infra: https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
Comment linking /analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server-side-tagging/
on “Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)”Submitted One Tag to Rule Them All: Introducing the New Google Tag as a story · 48 points
HN discussionyes, custom names for loader: https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server... and even hosted on your own infra: https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
Comment linking /analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server-side-tagging/
on “Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)”Submitted Intelligent Tracking Prevention In iOS 14, iPadOS 14, And Safari 14 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionyes, french article is updated, but this english translation is quite old here it is: https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server...
Comment linking /analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server-side-tagging/
on “Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)”Submitted Install Snowplow Analytics on the Google Cloud Platform as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBtw, someone wrote up a guide on hosting this on AWS, which covers what it would take to run it yourself. https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-googl... If I'm not mistaken, the key bit is that Google makes the docker image available at: gcr.io/cloud-tagging-10302018/gtm-cloud-image:stable Edit: oh, Google published a guide to self host maybe? https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/s…
Comment linking /analytics/deploy-server-side-google-tag-manager-aws/
on “Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)”Submitted Dear Google Analytics 4 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI read the original article back when it was published in November 2020[0]. This is what led me to introduce new static network filter options: - strict1p, strict3p [1] - header=, experimental, disabled by default [2] I used Simo Ahava's blog as test case, and with these new options, I could craft a filter to block the Google Tag Manager script on Simo Ahava's blog. However due to the lack of more test cases, no mor…
Comment linking /analytics/server-side-tagging-google-tag-manager/
on “Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)”Submitted Consent Settings in Google Tag Manager as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe thing is that you can host the server container also in AWS https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-googl... or Azure https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/server-side-tagging-azur...
Comment linking /analytics/server-side-tagging-azure-app-service/
on “Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)”Submitted ITP 2.1 and Web Analytics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou can actually sanity check how common it is for T.ly by triggering an analytics hit within a <noscript> tag. Looks like you're using GTM/GA on your site, so this[1] should put you on the right track. You'll still be blind to individuals that are blocking GTM/GA itself since you're not using the newer server-side GTM option, hence only a sanity check. But it's a fairly low-effort tweak to be able to get a read on…
Comment linking /analytics/track-non-javascript-visits-google-analytics/
on “URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies”Submitted Server-Side Tagging in Google Tag Manager as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou don't track the scrollbar itself, just scroll depth by quartile https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/scroll-depth-trigger-goo...
Comment linking /analytics/scroll-depth-trigger-google-tag-manager/
on “Roll Your Own Analytics”Submitted Track Form Abandonment with Google Tag Manager(2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Is iCloud Private Relay theatre? https://fingerprint.com/blog/ios15-icloud-private-relay-vuln... > 3rd party cookie blocking? It's very funny that you should ask this question in response to an article about fingerprinting without cookies. But yes, there are various workaround to use 1st party cookies or other storage to take the place of 3rd party cookies. Perhaps the worst is the Safari "Privacy Report", which h…
Comment linking /privacy/intelligent-tracking-prevention-ios-14-ipados-14-safari-14/
on “Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection”Submitted The Myth of the Non-Technical Marketer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAs someone who has wrestle with GA and GTM regularly, I think it's fair to say that the author (Simo Ahava[1]) is the preeminent authority on how they work, and his blog is generally more useful than the official documentation Google provides. 1: https://www.simoahava.com/about-simo-ahava/
Comment linking /about-simo-ahava/
on “No, Safari 14 does not block Google Analytics”> same requests sent to Google Analytics but with a different hostname There are instructions out there to also modify the path of the requests[1]. Consider this paragraph in the Summary section: > Cynics could say that this is an improved way to circumvent ad blockers. And they’d be right! This does make it easier to circumvent ad blockers, as their heuristics target not just the googletagmanager.com domain but als…
Comment linking /analytics/custom-gtm-loader-server-side-tagging/
on “CNIL makes Google Analytics almost illegal in France”Reposting my earlier comment from [0] This article is incorrect. There does not appear to be a change between Safari 13.1 and Safari 14 for how it handles GA. I have tested it myself. With Safari 13.1 Apple made a change [1] to their Intelligent Tracking Prevention that blocks all 3rd party cookies for cross site resources. The only change in Safari 14 appears to be that it reports which domains have had cookies blo…
Comment linking /analytics/no-safari-does-not-block-google-analytics/
on “Apple Safari to Block Google Analytics from Collecting Data”Sure! :) But I think it's all just about few principles. Elaborated a bit more on them: 1. Tailwind CSS classes extracted with purge-css, all inlined. 2. Favicon inlined, small images (<4kb) inlined. Not sure what’s the best threshold. Here is all https://turboeshop.com/inlinedimages/ is all page in one requests. Meaning two big images that are https://turboeshop.com/fastestpageintheworld/ were inlined - results are…
Comment linking /gtm-tips/build-custom-universal-analytics-client-server-side-tagging/
on “The mythical “fast” web page”Yea, that combined with the User Activity API is incredibly handy. Especially useful to pull out when some anomaly occurs, and stakeholders suddenly want a particular conversion under the microscope (an unexpected enterprise user, unusually large order value, an unexpectedly frequent recurring customer, etc). That said, all of the browsers are becoming so aggressive about cookie management that relying on the Google…
Comment linking /google-cloud/create-cookie-rewrite-web-service-google-cloud/
on “How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience”Simo Ahava is an absolute legend for anything google tag manager / google analytics related. No other site is even remotely close. https://www.simoahava.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is the best blog/article you read on internet?”Thanks for stating that directly! Re-reading my comment, it didn't come off as clearly as intended. And in fact, Simo also has a guide that walks through doing precisely what you mention[1]. What I meant was that with a standard and free GA installation, barring a paid GA360 subscription, you can't gain raw access directly to the GA clickstream from Google. And GA has a lot of unintuitive assumptions in their data p…
Comment linking /analytics/automatically-fork-google-analytics-hits-snowplow/
on “Install Snowplow Analytics on the Google Cloud Platform”