Ad Block Revenue Tool Documentation

How to install the most accurate impression-level ad block revenue loss/potential calculation tool on the market.

What is it

AB Revenue tool accurately measures lost revenue due to ad blocking.

The Adtoniq Ad Block Revenue Tool (AB Revenue) is JavaScript code you put on your website to measure the impact of ad blocking on your revenue. On each page view, the code will scan for blocked ads on your website, and then send one or more tracking pixels into Adtoniq’s analytics system. If no ad blocker is present, no tracking pixels are sent.

The tool allows Adtoniq to produce a report accurately estimating how much revenue you are losing due to ad blockers, and how much revenue Adtoniq could generate for you with this blocked inventory.

Timeline & Benefits

2 - 4 weeks to get an accurate measurement of your revenue loss.

Adtoniq’s AB Revenue tool uses advanced & proprietary measurement techniques to accurately detect when a user has an ad blocker enabled at the browser or network level.

With only two weeks of data, we are able to provide a more complete view of your business opportunity.

Most importantly, this tool is free and secure.

  • Detects desktop, mobile & network blocking
  • Works across all ad blockers including network-level
  • Robust filtering for bot traffic
  • Takes only a few minutes to install
  • Uses only 1k of browser memory & loads asynchronously

Most accurate & secure ad block measurement tool on the market today.

Deploying AB Revenue is as simple as:

  1. Make a copy of this Google Sheet to fill out with the ad placements that you want to track. We can help with this task for a fee. The core component of this task is writing CSS selectors for all ad placements that you want to measure.
  2. To receive the Javascript, send us the email address associated with your GitHub account. We will grant access to our repository.
  3. Place the JavaScript somewhere in the <head> section of all pages on your site. If you put this code on your site with a tag manager, you must first ensure that your tag manager is not blocked by ad blockers. Contact Adtoniq for support on making this determination. 
  4. Run the code for at least two weeks on your site.
  5. Take the code off your site.
  6. Adtoniq will provide a report summarizing revenue blocked and the Adtoniq revenue potential.

Getting the code

The code is maintained in a private, open source github repository located at https://github.com/adtoniq/abrt. You will need to provide your github email address to be invited to access the github repository. If you get a 404 error when clicking this link, it means you do not have access.

You must serve the obfuscated abrt-min.js file which can be hosted on your server or ours.

If you would like us to host it, please contact us for the URL.

What if ad blockers block the AB Revenue JavaScript?

Typically the ad block community takes months to block a JavaScript resource like this if they block it at all, and the ABRT code only needs to run for 2-3 weeks to collect sufficient data for a report. After sufficient time has passed, the code should be removed from the website. If perchance the code is blocked, it’s easy to update to unblock it.

Security And Privacy Considerations

The JavaScript code starts by detecting whether or not an ad blocker is present. It performs this test by creating a bait element for the ad blocker to block, and then testing to see whether or not the bait has been taken. If no ad blocker is present, no further action is taken.

If an ad blocker is found, the code will create transient tracking pixels as off-screen images appended to the end of the <body> of your DOM, which are subsequently deleted after the information has been sent. The src attribute of the <img> element encodes information summarizing the FQDN of the website, an indication of whether or not acceptable ads were enabled, and a list of which ads were blocked on the page.

No cookies are stored on the browser.

Our server retains log files with a one-minute time-to-live, containing all the information in the HTTP get request sent by the browser for the tracking pixel. The log files are kept in a secure Amazon S3 bucket, where they are subsequently analyzed to produce a report detailing the revenue opportunities broken down by ad placement.

Adtoniq is committed to not tracking its users. After using the browser’s IP address to perform coarse-grain geolocation by country, the IP address is scrubbed from our log files. That is, we do not retain any user’s IP address permanently in our system. If asked to produce and/or forget personal or uniquely identifying data about a user per GDPR requirements, Adtoniq would have nothing to produce nor forget.

Only a few select people have access to the data in the secure S3 bucket, and access requires two-factor authentication.