Third party analytics services are suffering from the growing prevalence of ad blocking, tracking protection, and the trend of minimizing connections and requests. However, from a site owner perspective, receiving usage information remains important for measuring site growth.
My expectation is that we are already on the curve where ads and tracking software will be more tightly integrated into websites and make it significantly more difficult for clients to disambiguate
“good” and “bad” scripts, which are mostly done today from the URL.
Google already provides the tools needed to relay analytics communication through a third party server, and it took under an hour to put together a proof of concept that removes the final third-party requests that are required when viewing this page. In essence, my server proxies all the requests that would normally go to Google, and adds on a couple extra parameters to track who the real client is.
The modified loading script for google analytics, and the corresponding nginx configuration to make my server a relay are here.