Aloodo

tracking protection for sites and brands

Aloodo for Web Publishers

How many of the people who visit your site are using some kind of protection from third-party tracking? For publishers seeking to reclaim ad revenue, user tracking protection is vital. Without protection, third-party tracking enables fraudulent and low-quality sites to claim to offer ads that reach your valuable audience. And third-party tracking drives ad standards down and creates incentives for ad blocking.

Tools to fix the problem are available for all the common browsers, but you have to understand the problem, and encourage readers to get protected, in order to move ad money back from tech intermediaries to your site.

Measuring the problem

In order to measure the problem on one news site, you can use some first-party data collection to measure people's vulnerability to third-party data collection.

The three parts of that big question are:

This will be easy to do with a little single-pixel image and the Aloodo tracking detection script.

Step one: add an image and two scripts to the page footer

The lines that matter are:

<script src="/code/check3p.js"></script>
<script src="https://ad.aloodo.com/track.js"></script>
<img id="check3p" src="/tk/sr.png"
 height="1" width="1" alt="">

I'm including a single-pixel image and two scripts: the Aloodo one and a new first-party script.

In most tracking protection configurations, the Aloodo script will be blocked, because ad.aloodo.com appears on the commonly used tracking protection lists.

Step two: write the first-party script

The local script can be as simple as this: /code/check3p.js

All it does is swap out the tracking image source three times.

The work is done in the setupAloodo function, which runs after the page loads. First, it sets the src for the tracking pixel to js.png, then sets up two callbacks: one to run after the Aloodo script is loaded, and switch the image to ld.png, and one to run if the script can track the user, and switch the image to td.png.

Step three: make reports and sell ads

In this example you can use the regular server logs to compare the number of clients that load the original image, and the JavaScript-switched one, to the number that load the two tracking images.

(There are two different tracking callbacks because of the details of how Aloodo has to detect Privacy Badger, among other things. Not all tracking protection works the same.)

This can be connected to other analytics systems, too. Some analytics, however, are blocked by some tracking protection.

This data helps sites create a report for advertisers on the trackability of the site's real audience. If a low-value competitor claims to reach the same people for less money, now you can show the difference between your numbers and theirs. Either you're reaching different people, or you have more real humans and they have more adfraud bots, or both.

Follow-up

Depending on the data you collect, you might choose to do a variety of tracking protection campaigns. Aloodo is designed to support:

Please contact us for more info, or follow our blog for updates.