Ad Block Tracking With Google Analytics: Code, Metrics, Reports

You don't use an ad blocker, right? Of course not! You would never want to take away the opportunity a content creator has online to monetize their work via ads.

I know that at least some of you think I'm being sarcastic. I am not, and this post is all about getting the data to show you that I am indeed not being sarcastic.

I am insanely excited that we can track ad blocking behavior in Google Analytics, so easily. This post covers these key elements:

Here's how this post unfolds…

While you could call on your favorite IT BFF to do this for you, let me encourage you by saying that if I can do this all by myself…. You can do it too! Honestly, it is that easy.

Excited? Let's go!

1. Ad block: #wth

The reason you might think I was being sarcastic above is that there is such venom in the media (of course the media!) about people who use ad blockers, and an incredible amount of hoopla around how the only reason media is dying is the awful people using ad blockers in their web browsers.

The reality is not quite that cut and dry.

First, plant me firmly in the column of people who believe that using an ad blocker is a personal choice, each person makes the moral decision they are most comfortable with. Second, I believe that the let me make cheap money by spraying and praying some of the most awful intelligent-deficient ads in large numbers is a contributing factors to users wanting to use ad blockers. Third, the profound lack of empathy for the user experience, especially on mobile, is another huge contributing factor.

If you are getting the feeling that I'm holding publishers, large and medium companies with large people, platforms and budgets to do more in this debate, you would be right. I am not excusing the users (see above, and more below).

Let me make this real for you, by looking at two specific examples.

Here's a tweet by my wonderful friend Mitch Joel.

Can you blame him for wanting to install an ad blocker?

And, now, whose fault is it? Both the non-intelligent advertiser and the non-intelligent publisher. Neither wants to grow up and consider using the data available for Mitch to be smarter about advertising. Both simply want cheap let me not work all that hard for it money.

Take thi second example from Forbes magazine on mobile… They are absolutely well within their rights to create a firewall around their site for people who use ad blockers…

But think about their text in green for a moment.

On a mobile platform should Forbes not have pity on its users and load the unwanted ads as fast as it can? On a mobile device, which we use more often in deeply private (beds) and openly public (subway) situations should they not auto-play videos?

They should. They can block their site, they can ask everyone to pay for content, they can ask people to pay for no-ads. It is their right. But, the above is close to a ransom note from a corporation to exhibit basic human decency.

In all the discussions for inherent awfulness of users of ad blocking solutions, this perspective never gets as much play. After all the people with the ink are the ones with the non-intelligent cheap money seeking existences.

I hope in the discussion of ad blocking, this gets some play. Relevance in advertising is possible, it is even exciting. Consider the See-Think-Do-Care business framework, discern the intent of your audience and ensure that you ad content, ad targeting and ad landing page are aligned with your audience's intent. You will be rich. They will be happier.

Speaking for me. I simply pay to get rid of advertising wherever I find it is awful (including at my employer, or powered by my employer's platforms). I love YouTube Red (and get Google Play Music for free!!). I'm happy to pay for Google Contributor. I'm curious to see the evolution of Optimal, a startup working on a similar solution. I actively control my Google Ads (sadly other platforms are not this kind), I spend a lot of time on The New York Times and The New Yorker, pay for both. And, of course I would not be as smart about digital marketing as I am without paying for Baekdal Plus.

You see different models people use to make money there. You can make money with content. You just need to create something incredible of value and want to make intelligent money.

Conversely if your strategy is to not change, not think about the value exchange carefully enough, not innovate, then blocking off access to content of an entire country will still fail. I give you Sweden.

Let me get off my high horse, and let's get some tracking going!

2. Technical how-to implement enhanced code guidance (Google Tag Manager or direct)

Tracking ad blocking behavior is quite simple.

If you have implemented analytics.js, via the standard recommended approaches, you can use the strategy below to simply update the code on your website manually. The code defines a simple plugin and then requires that plugin, passing it the custom dimension index that you'll create to capture ad blocking status.

All you need to do is make sure you replace the two bits in the red…

I don't trust WordPress to render code cleanly, always mucks something up. Please right click and save this text file: adblock_analyticsjs_tracking_avinash.txt

If you want to see a working example of this, just do View Source in your browser and check out my implementation of the above code. You'll notice my UA id as well as the fact that I've set the dimensionIndex as 1 (which will also be true for you if you are not using Custom Dimensions yet).

So, what's the code above doing? For security reasons, JavaScript code is not allowed to know what extensions are running on a user's browser. This means we can't be 100% sure if the user has an ad blocker installed, but we can make a pretty good guess. The way this code works is it creates an HTML element with the class name "AdSense" and temporarily adds it to the page. If the user has an ad blocker installed, the element will be invisible, so if that's true after the code inspects the element, then we can be reasonably sure the user has some sort of ad blocker installed.

If you're using GTM and the Universal Analytics tag, you can configure the tag to set the custom dimension via a user-defined custom JavaScript variable. The following function can be passed as that JavaScript and it will share whether ad block is enabled in the browser…

Please right click and save this text file for your use: adblock_gtm_tracking_avinash.txt

Honestly, that is all you need to do when it comes to things that touch your site.

Let now go and configure the Google Analytics front-end.

3. Setting Google Analytics front end elements (custom dimensions, segments)

Reporting for the ad blocking behavior of your users won't automatically show up in Google Analytics. We'll have to do two things to get set up.

Setup the custom dimension.

You need to have Admin privileges to do this step (if you don't have it, beg someone for it! :)).

Click on the Admin link in the top navigation.

On the resulting page, in the middle pane, called PROPERTY, you'll see a link called Custom Definitions (weirdly marked with a Dd), click on it.

Then, click on Custom Dimensions.

Then, the beautiful red button called + New Custom Dimension.

Here's the configuration…

Hit Save, and you are done with this part.

Now you also know where the ZZ value of 1 in {dimensionIndex: ZZ} came from. Above.

Setup an advanced segment.

Go to any report in Google Analytics. On top of the main graph, you'll see a button called + Add Segment, click on it.

Now, click on the red button named + New Segment.

On the left-side of the create segment window, you'll see a list of choices, under Advanced click on Conditions.

In the box named Filter, in all likelihood the first button you'll see will read Ad Content, click on it.

You'll see a search box, type in Ads (of whatever you named your custom dimension above) and you'll see a Custom Dimension called Ads Blocked. Click. If your boss prohibits you from searching, you can also scroll to the Custom Dimensions category and choose from there.

The next choice you'll make is to change Contains to Exactly Matches, and finally in the box just type in 1. And, here's the end result…

With this quick step… you are ready to rock and roll with data.

Before we go further, want to guess how many users of this blog, a self-described tech-savvy audience, use ad blockers?

Do I hear 80%?

Do I hear a 70%?

The answer will surprise you, it surprised me!

4. Five Reports and KPIs that deliver critical insights from ad blocking behavior

One caveat… This blog does not have any advertising on it. My books and my startup have links in the right nav, but most people won't think of them as pimpy ads as they are both mine and the books are inspired by the content from this blog. Hence, when I analyze the data below I might not find the type of insights between folks who use ad blocker and people who don't use ad blockers because on this site…. there is no advertising.

I'm going to teach you what types of reports and things to look for once you implement the above code. You are going to find fantastic insights from this analysis (like I do when I do this on sites that have lots of ads). But, you might not necessarily see them in the pictures I'm going to show you below – the pictures are just to teach you.

The very first simplest thing you'll do is figure out:

Q1. How many Users are blocking ads?

You can go to the first report you see when you log into Google and choose your Ads Blocked advanced segment (from above), and you'll be in business.

I LOVE custom reports [Five Smart Downloadable Custom Reports ]. I used one of my simpler acquisition custom report, and after I apply the segment, this is what it looks like…

Roughly 14% is the answer.

I have to admit I was pretty darn shocked. Most of my experience suggested that the minimum would be 50%, and perhaps even as high as 75% because of the attributes of the audience that reads this blog.

So much for experience!

This the the fun part about data. It beats experience / opinion / hot air / gut feelings etc.

Go get your own data. Don't wait for a newspaper, guru, pontificator-in-chief give you a "best practice."

Also above, you can see bounce rates (I expect that it will be much more different on your site, remember I have no ads here so it would not really dirve big differences). And, you can see the all important metric of Conversion Rate.

Nice report right? Acquisition, behavior, outcomes!

Q2. What is the difference in content consumption between people who block ads and those that don't?

Simple. Go to the Behavior folder, click on Overview, and bada bing, bada boom…

There seems to be slight difference between the time that people stay on the site if they use ad blockers. On your site, if you have loads of ads, I suspect you'll see a much larger difference.

Also look at the contrasts between Pageviews and Unique Pageviews.

Q3. Given the difference in privacy concerns across countries, is the ads blocking rate materially different across the world?

Go to Audience, Geo, Location…. In the bread crumbs on top of the table in this report, I choose Continent (simply to show you the whole world in a small table in the space I have available here)…

As you might have expected, Europe is the highest (but not by all that much). This was really fascinating for me because regardless of if I have ads on my site or note, this data is unaffected by the behavior things I was concerned about above. I would have expected Europe or Germany to have way, way higher than ad blocking then I saw in my blog's data.

Q4. Money! Do I have higher Per Session Goal Value from people who block ads?

Here's the theory behind this question: If the users are blocking ads they are having a better experience. And, if they are having a better experience, then it is more likely they deliver more goal value per session.

I created a quick and simple custom report for this (standard Google Analytics reports are so cluttered!).

Here's the main graph that allows me to reflect on long term trends…

For me at least, I would call it a wash.

Your mileage might wary because you'll actually have ads.

I consider this metric, Per Session Goal Value, to be critical for publishers and hence likely the best one you can use to measure the various implications on you from people's use of ad blockers.

Next, you'll look at the scorecard in the table, it gives you three simple metrics that will give context to PSGV…

And, finally of course you'll look to see if our KPI, PSGV, is influenced by the traffic source…

You can see the obvious differences above, it will give you a peek into the heads of the people coming to your site and it will also help you optimize your ad targeting and ad content strategies for Paid Media and even your Earned Media.

Q5. Do people who use ad blocking technologies end up being more loyal customers?

This is a very intriguing question to ask if you are a publisher. Does the recency and frequency change for people who use ad blockers?

Again, that is based on the hypothesis that if you are using ad blockers then supposedly you are having the best experience on the site, it should make your recency and frequency have a different (better!) profile.

I end up using this data to figure out, if the difference is material, to figure out how to consider monetizing these folks ("$5 for an ad-free experience, and you support us and keep us alive!").

There are other reports you can look at as well, but the collection of KPIs and reports above help you get pointed in the right direction.

And, that's a wrap!

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you track ad blocking behavior on your website today? If you use a different coding strategy, would you care to share it with us? How many people use ad blockers website, and what type of site is it? Do you see material differences in how people with ad blockers behave (bounce rates, depth of visit, per session goal value etc.) when compared to people who don't use ad blockers? Loaded question, do you block ads in your default browser?

Please share your strategies, successes, failures, lessons and advice via comments below.

Thank you.

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