Soapbox: Are ad blockers breaking the foundations of digital marketing?

I work for a B2B SaaS product and one of my tasks is to produce a monthly analytics report that breaks down our lead conversion rates. I track the conversion rate of website lands > demo requests > trials > closed deals.

Last month I was asked to create a Zapier integration that sent an alert to a Slack channel every time someone requested a demo through the website.

When doing the month’s report, I saw our Google Analytics demo request events were 22% lower than the number of messages sent to the Slack channel. It turns out ~20% of our visitors were blocking Google Analytic’s tracking.

After some research, I found that an average of 24% of internet users use an ad blocker. As more users become frustrated by ads, and Safari is looking to win the war for user privacy with intelligent tracking prevention built directly into the browser, the prevalence of ad blockers for all users will keep rising.

Are ad blockers going to break all of our analytics some point soon? It’s looking like they will and we need to start rethinking what’s next in how we use our website analytics.

Soapbox is a special feature for marketers in our community to share their observations and opinions about our industry. You can submit your own here.

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