Help Center Manage Your Account Ad Tag

What are the effects of ad blocking software?

Ad blocking software is designed to block ads served by many ad servers, including AdSpeed Ad Server. Therefore, we will not be able to serve ads and record impressions/clicks to visitors who enable ad blocker on their computers. Impressions and clicks reported in your account do not include these visitors since no ads were served to these visitors.

Reporting Discrepancies

Ad blocking is one of the most common reasons for ad metric discrepancies. For example, analytics software (like Google Analytics) might report a higher view count because they are often not blocked by the ad blocker while all popular ad servers are on the ad blocker's list.

Percentage of Visitors with Ad Blocking Software

The ad blocking rate is not the same across websites. It depends on a number of factors, including demographics, traffic sources and your site itself. In order to detect and measure the number of visitors with ad blocker, there are several ways:

Use the code to detect ad blocker and record into your web analytics, like Google Analytics, or
Setup a comparison test between a native pixel/image that does not get blocked and a pixel ad served by AdSpeed that is likely to be blocked by the ad blocker. Put both pixels (one do not get blocked and one served by AdSpeed) on your homepage and compare the gross impressions/hits between them to figure out the percentage of visitors with ad blocker. For the native pixel, you can use your web analytics software to count the number of hits. For the ad in AdSpeed, you can see its impression report.

Bypassing Ad Blockers

Although there are some technical tricks to bypass certain ad blockers, it is not a one-fit-all or guaranteed solution because ad blockers frequently update their algorithms and block lists. If the visitors do not want ads and yet they keep seeing too many ads then that is not a suitable long-term solution. Doing so would risk annoying your visitors even more and they might have an overall negative feeling about your website and your advertisers. It might be better to compromise. If ad blocking significantly affects your revenue, you should find a more cooperative and sustainable approach that works for both your visitors and your advertisers.

Depending on your preference and situation, there are different ways to deal with ad blocking. Non-technical approaches include letting your visitors know that your business depends on advertising revenue, and/or asking your loyal visitors to disable the ad blocker specifically for your site or donating a small amount if they choose not to view ads. Technical approaches include switching to native ad serving to avoid third-party ad requests, using a white-label ad server, and/or serving only non-intrusive and blocker-acceptable ads.

Ad Blocking Methods

There are different methods utilized by ad blockers such as resolving the ad server's known IP addresses or hostnames to a local/private IP (127.0.0.1), removing the IMG tag or ad container before displaying the page to end-users. If you use a private brand, some hostname-based ad blockers might not yet recognize your own ad serving sub-domain as a well known ad server and therefore allow ads to be served.

Partial Ad Blocking

Also there are certain browser's add-ons and plugins that act as a partial ad blocker. The original ads are replaced with other contents (images, widgets, apps, or their own ads). Some of these plugins include: OverApps, Add-Art, PWS Toolbar. This approach can cause confusion for the website owner and their advertisers who see something else instead of the expected advertisement.