Avoid the harmful impact of ad blockers on your website tracking code
More and more questions arise about how to make Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracking reliable, especially with the growing influence of adblock detected bypass. Many users are seeking solutions on how to bypass adblock detection and maintain accurate tracking, leading to a surge in inquiries about how to get past adblock detection without compromising data integrity. Approaches like Google Analytics cookieless tracking are also gaining attention, as businesses look for ways to preserve data quality while adapting to stricter privacy standards.
That’s why we've developed a powerful feature for our Custom Loader power-up – Enhanced ad blocker protection, which:
- Activates encryption for GA4 requests.
- Enhances the resistance of your GA4 scripts against adblock blockers bypass.
- Protects the integrity of your tracking code and preserves valuable data.
How does “Enhanced ad blocker protection” work?
- When the Google Analytics tracking code is triggered, it gathers data about the visitors to your website.
- Each action or event (e.g., pageview, click, transaction) triggers a separate request to gather the information.
- This data can be lost if the visitor uses an ad blocker, which identifies patterns in the request URL (e.g., "/g/collect") to flag data collection. Even if you use a server-side tracking for GA4, ad blockers can still block requests using the /g/collect pattern used by GA4 events. Our “Enhanced ad blocker protection” encrypts these requests, making them unrecognizable to ad blockers.
- GA4 processes the requests by grouping individual events and associating them with the corresponding session.
How to activate “Enhanced ad blocker protection”?
| This feature is available for all users that are hosting server GTM container on Stape. If you don’t have a Stape account, please sign up and follow a detailed guide on how to set up server-side tracking in our blog. |
Custom Loader
Enhanced ad blocker protection is a setting inside the Custom Loader power-up, not a standalone feature. To turn it on, you'll first need to set up Custom Loader for your container — the toggle is simply one of the options you'll configure along the way.
How to configure Custom Loader power-up
2. Select your sGTM container on the dashboard.
3. Click Power-ups, then click the “Use” button next to the Custom Loader panel.
4. Toggle the Custom Loader switch.
5. Configure Custom Loader with the following settings:
- Domain - choose one of the domains linked to your container.
- Web GTM ID - paste your web Google Tag Manager ID.
- Enhanced ad blocker protection - when this option is enabled, all your requests to the server sGTM will be encrypted so that ad blockers cannot block them based on request patterns.
- Same Origin Path - If you have the same origin configured, specify the path used, and both GTM and GTAG JS will be loaded via the same origin. Learn more about the same-origin approach for server GTM here.
- Platform - the web GTM code differs for each eCommerce platform. If you are using Stape applications for CMS, select the platform from the list. Otherwise, select the “Other” option to generate a JS snippet. You can find out more about Stape Conversion Tracking apps for CMS on our page.
Setup for popular platforms
If you use the Shopify, WordPress/WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix, or PrestaShop platform, you’ll need a respective app/plugin/extension developed by Stape to set up Custom Loader.
1. Download and configure the app for your platform:
- Shopify: download link, configuration guide.
- WordPress/WooCommerce: download link, configuration guide.
- Magento: download link, configuration guide.
- BigCommerce: download link, configuration guide.
- Wix: download link, configuration guide.
- PrestaShop: download link, configuration guide.
2. Go back to the Custom Loader setup page. Once you’ve entered all the Code & Setup information, click the Generate button.
3. Follow the instructions on the Configuration panel to set up Custom Loader in your app.
Setup for other platforms
If you select the Other platform, you will be given a JS code to use on your site instead of the standard GTM loader. To configure the code, enter the following extra information:
- User identifier type - available if the “Generate with Cookie Keeper” option is active (see below). The recommended method of identification is a cookie. For more details, see how to choose a User Identifier.
- Cookie name - define the name of the first-party cookie to use as a user identifier.
You can click Advanced settings to enter additional information:
- Data Layer variable name - specify if you use a non-standard ‘dataLayer’; otherwise, leave it empty.
- Generate with Cookie Keeper - available if you have the Cookie Keeper power-up active. If enabled, the code will also add the Cookie Keeper operation along with GTM loading.
- Set _xsd localStorage only after consent - when enabled, Stape stores the ad-blocker status in _xsd localStorage only after analytics_storage consent is granted in Google Consent Mode. Without consent, detection still runs, but the result is not saved between page visits. If disabled, saving to localStorage will occur regardless of the consent status.
6. Click Generate. You will then be given instructions on how to add a Custom Loader to your site (or a JS code if you selected the “Other” platform).
Make the necessary changes on your website (add the code), or in the Stape applications you use.
When adding the Custom Loader to the site, make sure you also remove the standard GTM loader if you have one.
Test the setup of Custom Loader
To check if everything works correctly, right-click on any website page → click Inspect → open the Network tab. Then, enter your custom subdomain or the same origin path if used.
If everything is correct, you should see the Google Tag Manager request URL and “200 OK” Status Code.
Below is an example of encrypting the GA4 request with the active Custom Loader and enhanced ad blocker protection toggle:
And here is what it looks like without the Custom Loader and without enhanced ad blocker protection configured:
Using Custom Loader with GTM Environments
GTM Environments let you load a specific version of your container (e.g., staging or development) instead of the published version. If you use environments, you need to manually add the environment parameters to your Custom Loader code.
1. Get your environment parameters.
- In web GTM, go to Admin → Environments.
- Find your environment and click Actions → Get Snippet.
- Copy the three parameters from the snippet URL: gtm_auth, gtm_preview, and gtm_cookies_win.
2. Add the environment parameters to the head snippet.
In the generated Custom Loader head code, locate the E.src line.
Append the parameters to the query string:
E.src=f+"/"+i+".js?"+c+v+">m_auth=XXXX>m_preview=env-N>m_cookies_win=x"Be sure to replace gtm_auth, gtm_preview, and gtm_cookies_win in the example with your own respective parameters. Also, it is highly recommended to add new parameters at the end of the URL string to avoid breaking anything (i.e., do NOT add them in the middle like E.src=f+"/"+i+".js?"+c+new parameters+v).
3. Add the environment parameters to the body snippet.
Do the same for the body snippet:
Append the same parameters to the iframe URL in the body snippet (replace the gtm_auth, gtm_preview, and gtm_cookies_win in the example with your own respective parameters):
<noscript><iframe src="https://your-subdomain.stape.work/ns.html?id=GTM-XXXXXX>m_auth=XXXX>m_preview=env-N>m_cookies_win=x" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden"></iframe></noscript>| Environment parameters are tied to a specific environment. If you regenerate your Custom Loader snippet (e.g. after changing settings), you'll need to re-add the environment parameters manually, since they are not saved by Custom Loader. |
Ad Blocker Info
While Custom Loader helps you bypass blockers, Ad Blocker Info power-up shows you how many of your visitors actually use them. It adds a header to every sGTM request and returns true if an ad blocker is on, and false if not.
This way, you see the real share of traffic that hides ads and decide if you need to change ad placements or budget.
How to set up Ad Blocker Info
Note:
1. Log in to your Stape account and select your sGTM container from the dashboard.
2. Go to Power-ups and click Use next to the Ad Blocker Info panel.
3. Toggle the Ad Blocker Info switch to enable it and click Save changes.
To use the header, create a variable with the type Request Header and enter the X-User-Adblocker name:
- Go to your sGTM container.
- Create a new User-Defined Variable with the type Request Header and enter the header name.
- Click Save.
Testing
Open your sGTM container's Preview mode and trigger events on your website. Click on the Incoming HTTP Request.
In the incoming requests, check for the X-User-Adblocker header - it’ll show true if an ad blocker is active, or false if it isn’t.
Measure results of server-side tracking with Stape
With Stape Analytics you can observe how “Enhanced ad blocker protection” has influenced your Google Analytics 4 performance.
It helps to understand how many users you have with technologies that interfere with tracking (adblockers). But the number of users depends entirely on the audience that visits your site, in some cases it is 5% of the audience, in some 50%.
If you would like to activate Stape Analytics and see the value of using server side, simply go to your Stape sGTM container to turn on Analytics.
Use case
A client activated Stape Analytics in early November. Initially, they observed that only 8.55% of their website visitors were being tracked by Google Analytics 4, which corresponds to the percentage of visitors who had ad blockers preventing GA4 tracking.
The client was losing valuable data from a significant portion of their website visitors, as users with ad blockers were not being tracked properly by GA4. This limited the accuracy of their analytics and the insights they could gain for optimizing their marketing strategies.
After activating "Enhanced ad blocker protection" toggle within Stape's Custom Loader in late November, the client observed a significant improvement in the tracking accuracy. The percentage of website visitors with ad blockers increased to 35% on average, and these users were successfully tracked by GA4 thanks to the bypass functionality.
Case study: 20% of data recovered from tracking prevention | Peak Metrics
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