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Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

ilakovac.com

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Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#91

Post by rchaud »

ookware wrote: post #70
sofixa wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm about to give you money. That's the only 'analytic' you should care about Yeah, but who are you? Are you an impulse buyer? Returning? Did you spend an hour on the product page? Did you jump between 20 different product pages? You can't deny that this kind of analytics can be very useful for user conversion and website design. And the site in question tries to do the proper thing, checking if GA works before try…

That's great, but all of that tracking is pointless if I can't actually complete the sale

That's not on TeeSpring, that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy. The user is running code on their local machine that breaks his/her own ability to complete the sale.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#92

Post by jasonlotito »

josephcsible wrote: post #54
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #44

Hang on: The Tee Spring code checks if GA is there and works without it, the website breaks because Ad block replaces GA with a fake object that doesn't have the same API. Perhaps some companies have the resources to check if their websites run with different ad blockers, but expecting websites to work when plugins are replacing and breaking running code is a big ask.

I think the point is that Google Analytics shouldn't be an essential part of your site, so it totally breaking for any reason should be unnoticeable to the end user.

It's not. It can work without it. The issue is something is pretending to be Google Analytics just enough to cause problems.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#93

Post by ianhawes »

Dudeman112 wrote: post #75
wai1234 wrote: post #30

Your checkout shouldn't trigger ad block. Stop slavishly bowing to GA everywhere. I'm about to give you money. That's the only 'analytic' you should care about. I'm tired of being treated as little more than a data cow, always ready for milking. Just. Stop. To the person who ignores people who complain because their 'non-standard' browsers fail on their site, why do you have a site if you don't care about your users…

Unless you're a big or medium sized org, fixing an issue that is seen by less than 0.01% of visitors is probably waaay down the priority list on the backlog

I beg to differ, we've run into issues with ad-blocking before and our target audience is definitely NOT on the tech-savvy side.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#94

Post by rchaud »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #56

Some critical sites I need to pay through are so fundamentally broken by uBlock Origin and uMatrix that I've been forced to use the embedded browser in the LastPass app. Since they're utility bills, credit cards, insurance portals, etc, I don't really have a choice not to use their services.

Why not just use the default browser?

FF is my main browser, so for anything behaving in a finicky way, I use Chrome, which doesn't have any extensions or Google IDs attached to it.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#96

Post by dawnerd »

rchaud wrote: post #89
wai1234 wrote: post #30

Your checkout shouldn't trigger ad block. Stop slavishly bowing to GA everywhere. I'm about to give you money. That's the only 'analytic' you should care about. I'm tired of being treated as little more than a data cow, always ready for milking. Just. Stop. To the person who ignores people who complain because their 'non-standard' browsers fail on their site, why do you have a site if you don't care about your users…

What if I told you that the majority of people on a checkout page, don't actually check out, but abandon the cart instead? "How would you even know that?" I hear you ask. Well, that's an interesting story....

Plenty of ways to get that data without invasive tracking like GA.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#97

Post by rchaud »

vzaliva wrote: post #27

Also ad block should not break log-in process. I recently discovered that I could not log in to a web site unless I disable ad block. All core web site functionality should be tested to work with ad blocking. Unless you really hate your users.

Adblockers block Google Analytics, which is a different script from the ones that are served as part of displaying banner ads.

GA has an enormous set of capabilities for measuring user activity and e-commerce, especially because Tag Manager lets you assign trackable events anywhere you need to on the site.

It may be interesting to see if that site works if 'analytics.js' and 'gtm.js' are greenlit. Those are the main GA scripts. Everything else would likely be ad-related.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#98

Post by shadowgovt »

As a web developer, ad blockers are maddening. The problem is that they're part of an arms race that even if you don't use ads, you have to be aware of.

Early in my career, I worked on a site that displayed images, each of which was given a GUID and loaded from a server in thumbnail form. Fortunately, one of our developers used an ad blocker, because she realized two (of a couple hundered) thumbnails didn't show up. Turns out her ad blocker was running a heuristic based on both dimensions of the thumbnail and the URL the thumbnail was served from, and if it saw the sequence 'ad' in the URL (plus some additional pieces of the URL we never identified; attempts to reproduce it with a simpler URL didn't pan out), the browser extension would block the image from loading and our users got a broken image.

The best solution we could come up with was tweak the server logic to substitude 'a' with 'g' when vending the URLs, and then reverse the substitution when fetching them. Huge pain in the ass on our end, but necessary to ensure our customers' user experience didn't break from their own ad blockers.

"Ad block shouldn't break your checkout..." but it's third-party code you don't own or control splicing behavior atop the code you do own and control, so of course it breaks things occasionally. It's like the old era of the MacOS Desk Accessory API. It is provably mathematically impossible for the developer to guarantee successful execution of a Turing-complete program if the program can be arbitrarily modified by third-party injection, so the odds that browser extension in general (and ad blockers in particular, as they are designed to modify the intended site behavior) don't break any website are vanishingly close to zero.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#99

Post by Kwpolska »

sparker72678 wrote: post #10

I’ve been running into this sort of thing more and more and more. It’s crazy how many page rely on some kind of google tag manager event before they’ll load the real content or perform the main function of the page. Don’t all developers have ad blockers (clearly not)? I understand managers not testing for this, but for my own work it’d never load for me as a Dev, even.

I don’t have an ad blocker on my work machine. The light web browsing I do on that machine mainly involves docs, internal resources, and sites like SO — which don’t have any ads or have very inobtrusive banners.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#100

Post by mindslight »

Karunamon wrote: post #85
mindslight wrote: post #46

While we're at it, potential customers shouldn't need to identify pictures of traffic lights and buses to shop your store. If you're a web store , then you're in the business of selling things and advertising that you're selling them far and wide. The only place you might need a CAPTCHA is the account login page, and only then after there are multiple failed attempts from the same IP address. Other than that, get the…

Depends on if you have a bot/scraping problem or not. Though admittedly sitting behind something like Cloudflare and leveraging their reputation system rather than blithely embedding recaptcha into your page might be the way to go, but then you're married to Cloudflare. Pick your poison.

Apart from the caveat I gave regarding logins, there is simply no such thing as a bot or scraping "problem" for a web store. Your goal is to advertise what you are selling far and wide - bots are your friends. If you have problems with site load, the first thing to do is make your site more efficient. If you're a small operation and that still isn't enough, add generic server side throttling.
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