While seen as a benefit to most consumers, these changes have unfortuantely impacted website owners in a number of negative ways: besides obviously blocking ads from being displayed on website pages, the blocker apps have also been known to disrupt the way the pages are rendered, skewing their content and design. They also have a block trackers setting which basically blocks analytics tags from downloading and firing when a page loads in Safari or Chrome where these extensions or iOS systems are being used – meaning visits to your website from these browsers will not be tracked in your analytics system.
Google Analytics, or any other analytics platform, help businesses and website owners understand their website traffic: who and where their traffic is coming from, any issues with their website and how they can improve it, how users are interacting with website content, and which pages are the highest performing. It’s impossible to understand this information without analytics data, which is why it’s important for you to know how to detect traffic that is being blocked by the ad blocker apps and extensions, and get back to truly understanding your website visitors.
The first step in tracking the use of ad blockers in Google Analytics involves some html coding, that is described in detail in this post from Martijn Hoiting:
First we have to create a new Custom Html tag. Inside it we have our fake Advertisement.
After this we include jQuery, and our script to dectect if our fake advertisement is shut down by determining the height of our div.
We wil fire this tag on All pages.
And the code:
