Today we’ve traveled to the Search Analytics and Social Conference at Manchester University. There’s been a number of good sessions so far but one in particular has led to the creation of this post. The session covered the topic of AD blockers and the knock on effect to Analytics programmes.
If we look at the Google trend data shown in figure 1 for the term AD blocker we see a major increase in search traffic against the term and there popularity is only going to increase as businesses try to capture our attention on websites and search engines to return to their websites.
The article from Deliberately Digital provides an overview of the issue and you can read the authors thought here. If Pierre Far is correct then Google Analytics tracking code is being blocked by a number of the key pieces of software in this space, giving inaccurate results in the analytic data.
A quick Google search for the topic comes back with a number of articles with methods to identify the percentage of visitors to the website that make use of AD Blocking software. To effectively measure effectiveness of website traffic and actions understanding the difference between visitors will become increasingly important as AD blocking software becomes more widespread.
To read how to split the traffic and filter in Analytics see this article from BuySellAds.
I’m currently integrating into a number of websites to see how it works. Once we have some useful data we’ll post the results.
