Who is this article for?
This article will be useful to you if are a company looking to understand how you can prevent Adblockers from affecting your links.
With the usage of ad blockers on the rise, it's important to know the impact ad blockers can have on the links your partners use, and how you can avoid losing clicks and conversions to ad blockers.
Ad blockers commonly block domains that are associated with affiliate links, including the domains of many other partnerships tools. We recently learned that grsm.io, PartnerStack’s default domain for partner links, has been added to a list of domains that many ad blocking tools reference. This means that people using ad blockers who click a grsm.io link may not be redirected to your site.
To ensure that your links continue to work as intended and are not blocked by ad blocking software, you can start using a branded link domain.
Using your own domain for your PartnerStack links will both prevent issues with ad blocking software and make your links more on-brand. There is no additional cost for using a branded link domain.
How to set up your branded link domain
- Step 1: Follow the instructions in this article to set up your branded link domain.
- Step 2: Send an email campaign to your partners to let them know that new links are available for your program. Their old grsm.io links will continue to work, but could be blocked by ad blockers. Encouraging partners to switch to your branded links will ensure their referred traffic makes it to your site, and that your partners continue to get credit for their conversions.
Why was the grsm.io domain added to ad blockers?
Ad blocking tools do two things: prevent ads from appearing within a page and prevent people from having their activity tracked across the web. Because PartnerStack tracking links track user activity in order to correctly attribute conversions to your partners, they fall under tracking activity that these tools are designed to block.
The Grsm.io domain was manually added to a list of domains called EasyList, which ad blocking tools use as a reference. There was no unusual activity that led to this domain being added — someone simply noticed that it’s a domain that tracks activity, and added it to EasyList.
It’s important to note that only the grsm.io domain has been flagged, so switching to using a custom domain will prevent your links from being blocked by ad blocking tools.
What do users with Adblocker see when clicking a blocked link?
It depends on the Adblocking software the user has installed, but typically they will be informed that the page has been blocked and asked if they want to disable blocking and continue, as shown below:
If a user disables blocking and continues to the destination, any resulting conversions will still be accurately attributed to your partners.
How will PartnerStack prevent similar situations in the future?
As the internet becomes increasingly privacy-minded, more people are using tools like ad blockers, and more browsers are blocking the most common types of tracking by default.
To meet this new standard, we’re hard at work on a complete overhaul of how links work in PartnerStack, including adding modern server-to-server tracking that is unaffected by ad blocking tools and respects the privacy of users.
We’ll have more to share on our new approach to links later this year. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to support@partnerstack.com — we’re here to help!