Do ad blockers prevent Attributer from working?

Ad Blockers are little bits of software that exist to prevent ads from loading on websites.

They’re generally not designed to stop tracking & analytics tools like Attributer, but you may be wondering how these could impact the attribution data you receive.

So in this article, we’ll dive into how ad blockers work and how likely they are to impact the attribution data you receive from Attributer.

How do ad blockers work?

When a visitor arrives at your website, their web browser (I.e. Google Chrome, Windows Edge, etc) makes calls to lots of different places to get the content it needs to display on the page. Depending on how your website is built, it might call one spot to get the images, another to get the text, another to get the Google analytics code, another to get the Attributer code, etc.

Ad Blockers work by monitoring where the browser is making requests to, and if any of those locations match the lists they have of known ad networks, it will block the content from loading.

The end result is the ad that was supposed to load on the page is blocked from loading, so it doesn’t appear.

Do ad blockers prevent Attributer from working?

In the vast majority of cases, the answer is no. But there’s some nuance to it that is worth understanding.

Do Ad Blockers prevent the Attributer code from loading?

No. Whether a resource gets blocked from loading all comes down to whether it is on the ‘blacklist’ maintained by the ad blockers, and as far as we know Attributer is not on any of those lists.

Fundamentally, Attributer is not a provider of ads so it’s unlikely we would ever be on any of these lists.

Do Ad Blockers prevent Attributer from storing the data in a cookie?

It’s technically possible, but highly unlikely. Some Ad Blockers have the ability to block first-party cookies (Attributer stores the data in a first-party cookie, which is different from a third-party cookie) from being stored but is turned off by default and most don’t recommend turning it on.

This is because First-Party cookies are a fundamental part of how the web works and majority of websites couldn’t function properly without them. eCommerce sites couldn’t remember the items you have in your cart, and you’d have to login to your Facebook account every time you moved from page to page (because it couldn’t remember you are logged in, so it would have to ask you to log in again).

So although it is technically possible for ad blockers to prevent Attributer from storing data in a first-party cookie, the vast majority (99.9%) of visitors to your website won’t have this setting enabled, because if they did, it would be almost impossible for them to use the internet.

In Summary

To summarise, although it is technically possible that an Ad Blocker could prevent Attributer from working properly, it would really only happen in 0.001% of cases and is not likely to meaningfully impact the quality and quantity of attribution data you get on your leads.