What is Enhanced ad blocker protection in Custom Loader, and how does it work?

While configuring the Custom Loader power-up in your server GTM container on Stape, you can activate the “Enhanced ad blocker protection” toggle.

Enhanced ad blocker protection encodes all requests sent to the server-side GTM. It helps prevent ad blockers from detecting and blocking the requests.

Let’s consider, as an example, the GA4 requests. Such requests have an exact URL pattern which looks like '/g/collect?v2&tid=.....'. Ad blockers are designed to detect this pattern and block any matching requests.

If you use Custom Loader with activated Enhanced ad blocker protection, all requests are encoded. As a result, they have no such pattern and can’t be blocked by ad blockers. Before the request reaches the GTM server, it is decrypted, so in the sGTM preview, you can see the original request without encryption.

Below is an example of encrypting the GA4 request with the Enhanced protection option:

And here is what it looks like without the Enhanced protection option configured: