Aloodo for Web Sites
How many of the people who visit your site are using some kind of protection from third-party tracking?
Ad fraud and attribution fraud can make data-driven marketing difficult, by creating confusing data about which campaigns and projects are bringing in your desired users.
Data on tracking-protected users can be a valuable way to check that your audience is authentic. When you know the tracking protection profile of your real users, campaigns that bring in bogus users will stand out right away—and help keep your marketing focused.
Measuring the problem
In order to measure tracking protection, 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:
Does first-party JavaScript load and run?
Does third-party JavaScript (from a site on popular filter lists) load and run?
Can a third-party
tracker
see state from other sites?
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.
When the script runs, to check that this is a browser with JavaScript on.
When the Aloodo tracking script runs, to check if this browser is blocking the script from loading.
When the Aloodo script confirms that tracking is possible.
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: understand your users
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 you create a report on the trackability of your site's real audience. If a campaign claims to reach the same people for less money, now you have the data to evaluate it.
Follow-up
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