Me: "How many visits does your website get a month?"
Them: "Around 100,000 visits."
Me: "How are you measuring that, client site analytics or server side?"
Them: "Client side... Google Analytics.. why does it matter?"
Me: "40% of people have an ad-blocker installed, so, chances are you website traffic is misleading, but don't worry it means you're probably getting 40% more traffic"
Them: "Phew.. that's great"
Me: "Except that does mean your conversion rates are likely 20% worse"
Them: "Help me fix this, please."
Let me be clear.. their are ALOT of variable in the above scenario, let me enumerate a few:
0) The research on this is... limited. HootSuite published some survey results, but as you will hear me repeat, the map is not the terrain... https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users#ad-blocking-stats
1) Mobile ad-blockers are far less common, and browsing websites on mobile devices is around 75%.
2) Some clever website have fixed the ad-blocking issue by proxying their client side analytics through their own domain.
3) Ad blocking varies hugely by country, some parts of the world, e.g. South East Asia, the take up is huge, other parts. e.g. Djibouti, its not so high.
4) People often tell me they use server side page loads to count views, which is fine, but I don't believe them. I mean, I believe they are using server side page loads to count views, but, having worked in enough big businesses, I don't believe some major part of their business isn't depending on what their client side analytics is telling them. They tell me they only use the client side data to 'decorate' their server side data. Honestly, this makes no sense, either the data is accurate or you don't use it.
Final thoughts
The interesting part, for me, is that so many people are so blind to this issue which affects anywhere between 10% and 40% of your traffic.
It's fairly easy to fix these Adblocking issues, if you know what you are doing... drop me a line on Twitter if you want a steer: @DavidJames