Ad blockers and your tracker domain

Somewhere between a quarter and half of technical audiences browse with an ad blocker or a privacy extension. If your partners write for developers, that is your traffic. This page explains what a blocker actually does to attribution, what our design already absorbs, what a tracker host of your own adds, and where the honest limit is.

What an ad blocker does to a tracker

Blockers work from filter lists. A filter can stop a page loading a script from a known tracking domain, block requests to it, delete its cookies, or strip parameters from URLs. The commercial lists mostly target third-party advertising networks, and an affiliate tracker gets caught in two ways: its script is served from a domain on a list, or its click report is sent to one.

The damage is not always total. A blocker that stops the click report but not the script costs you a click row, not the sale; a blocker that stops the script entirely costs both. And the strictest setups strip ?ref= style parameters before any script sees them, at which point there was never anything to track.

What the design already absorbs

Some of this is answered by how the tracker is built, before you configure anything:

• One script, one origin. The script is served from the same host as its click endpoint, under one versioned path. There is no separate CDN domain, no secondary beacon host, and no runtime dependency fetched from a third party. Fewer origins means fewer entries a filter list can match.
• The referral survives a blocked report. The script stores the referral in the cookie and localStorage before it calls us, so a blocked click request loses a row in your click count, not the attribution. The sale still binds when it arrives. This is why the click count is the soft number.
• Two storage media. A blocker or a browser that clears one of cookie and localStorage still leaves the other carrying the referral.
• The click report is a plain POST. It sends no preflight request and survives the visitor navigating away mid-request.

The real answer: serve it from your own name

The single most effective step is the one the product already has a screen for: Insights, Attribution health, Your own tracker host. Add a subdomain of your own site, something like go.yourdomain.com, follow the DNS step the dashboard gives you, and the script and its click endpoint are both served from your name.

Filter lists block trackers by domain, and go.yourdomain.com is not on any list: to a blocker it looks like your site talking to itself, because that is what it is. The same change upgrades Safari attribution, since the referral cookie is now set by the server on your registrable domain and Safari honours your full attribution window instead of capping a script-set cookie at seven days. One DNS record buys both.

Setup details, including what the dashboard verifies before and after, are in Links and domains. After switching, run Check my install on the same page to prove the path end to end.

What nothing can fix

An honest limit, because you will read a different story elsewhere: a determined blocker wins, and no tracker of any brand changes that.

A user can run their browser with JavaScript disabled for your site, use a content blocker that strips referral parameters from URLs before the page loads, block first-party storage wholesale, or browse in a mode that discards everything on close. In each of those cases there is no referral to capture, no place to keep it, or no way to report it. Any vendor claiming to recover attribution from that visitor is describing fingerprinting. We do not do that. The practical goal is not one hundred percent capture. It is making sure the ordinary majority tracks reliably, the privacy-conscious minority fails cleanly rather than half-attributing, and your commission numbers stay exact for every sale that does bind.

If a partner reports that their own clicks do not show, an ad blocker on their browser is the most common cause. Their link still works for their audience; suggest they test it in a private window with extensions off, or watch Attribution health while they click.