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I'm currently working at a platform that delivers banners. But these are not those annoying banners that you see on every website. They are interactive banners which expand only if you click on it. The problem is that adblock is not blocking the banner itself, it's blocking the tracking pixel that I'm injecting into the banner.

Why I want to solve this? Well, it will cost me money to deliver that banner, you'll see it and I will not be aware of that.

I'm currently trying to find a method of tracking the banners without a tracking pixel. Any good ideas for this? Thank you guys.

Matei
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  • You could possibly avert AdBlock by using different class names, or other markers that AdBlock uses to find ads. Are you tracking page views (just log how many times it's requested from the server)? Or ad clicks (then send the users to a counter page and auto-redirect to the advertized page)? – DACrosby Apr 27 '15 at 07:10
  • Adblock is blocking stuff base on rules, so you just need to "play nice" and looking for the current global rules and avoid it (ex: url never contain the word "adv"...) – DQM Apr 27 '15 at 07:26
  • Are you serving your images from a CDN? – Brad Baskin Apr 27 '15 at 08:13
  • @DACrosby yes, I'm tracking these things. But the problem is that we're using some 3rd party pixel tracking service too. Which starts with "ad". related too. BradBaskin no, I'm serving my pixel from node js (it's loaded into the banner from node ). Clients only pay views tracked by the network mentioned above. – Matei Apr 27 '15 at 08:18

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Depending on how you serve your imaging pixel, One possibility is to set up a proxy in front of your images and use the logs to track the banners that you serve. Alternately, you can use the proxy to perform some logic and trigger an insert into a database of sorts (although that would likely make the proxy a bit slow).

You can also use the proxy to alias the tracking pixel's name so that it does not have the "ad" text in the filename. This may get it around the adblocker all by itself and can be done with simple pattern matching logic

You can use a proxy like nginx or HA proxy

Brad Baskin
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