Ad Blocker w/ Segment.io

user_5456001 0
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I'm considering using segment.io for several of my client-side 3rd party API needs, but I'm a little concerned about ad-blockers.

My app has no ads, but I do a lot of event-tracking for product analytics, as well as error tracking.

Segment.io offers a nice all-in-one solution, but if it's blocked, and all my eggs are in that basket, then, well, I won't have any eggs left, or however that idiom ends.

So my question is: is there a way to integrate multi-purpose event tracking (segment.io, keen.io, etc.) that isn't as susceptible to ad-blocking?

My app is mostly serverless, using a Firebase+AWS Lambda setup, so I've tried to think of some kind of back-end solution, but no big ideas so far.

ETA: I'm not looking to track adblocking users or violate anyone's trust. my question is about event-tracking unrelated to a user's identity, and whether or not that's possible in an all-in-one event tracking library that might be ad-blocked.

analytics
3 Answers

When gathering analytics segment also provides server side tracking libraries. This can be quite useful when you want to gather metrics for certain types of events that might be blocked by users on the client. At it's simplest, Segment has an HTTP Source but there are a number of popular languages supported as well. https://segment.com/docs/connections/sources/catalog/#server

The classic example is the order complete event, this would typically happen in your server once that transaction has been committed to a database. Regardless of browser configuration, you could send this event from the server and track.

Be sure you respect the users consent management settings here though.

user_43019650

A lot of valid points are already mentioned in the accepted answer, I would mention a few technical considerations to minimize ad blockers impact on tracking tools (Segment, Google Tag Manager, etc):

  • Develop for server-side tracking. Whatever is on server cannot be blocked by ad blockers. However, this is usually tricky and very custom, Segment gives some examples on it as well.
  • Use managed client-side proxy solutions like DataUnlocker. This is great and does not require many code changes.
  • Use self-hosted open-source solutions for proxying Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager like this or this. I believe these solutions can be extended to support Segment as well.
user_25901500
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