How to disable Ad Blockers

Last week I posted an article about Ad Blocker Detection. Once you have an estimate of the potential advertising impressions lost, you can decide if you want to address it and how you wish to do that.

Some websites think of visitors employing ad blockers as content thieves. Some sites even go as far as forcing users to accept adverts to browse their pages. Personally I believe most sites don't have strong enough content to warrant this and they will only alienate users.

I believe the only way to get visitors to disable their Ad Blocker on your site is to ask them, nicely. All you can do is encourage them to support your site.

Have a look at these two banners. If you have an Ad Blocker currently enabled, then they will be identical. If not, then you will see an old Amazon banner I exhumed, and then a clear and polite message asking for support.

Both banner slots have the message set as the background image, but it is not visible for top slot as the Amazon banner is in the foreground.

To ensure the the background message is not displayed to users when no Ad Blocker is employed, the first frame of the image is transparent and is displayed for 5 seconds. Even the slowest advertisement should load within that timeframe.

If you are concerned that this message might be displayed to the user when no advertising inventory is available for this slot, then I would suggest you address the lack of ad availability before you try and reclaim more impressions. Beyond that, the prudent approach would be to set the background property for the banner slot with JavaScript only after you have detected the user is using ABP.

Ad Blocker Detection

Late last week I mentioned Adblock Plus in my list of Essential Add-on Tools for Firefox. Here's the description again, just in case you missed it:

Adblock Plus allows you to browse without ads. It works very well and is incredibly popular because of that. Users love it, advertisers and websites dependant on ad revenue hate it. As long as flash banners keep soaking up CPU cycles, I'll keep using it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

Just about all websites rely on advertising revenue to some degree. The problem is, how do you measure the number of potential impressions you're losing to ABP?

A couple of weeks ago I cooked up a very simple solution that seems to perform quite well. In this example I'll track it with Google Analytics, but you could easily rework it to your own system.


ABP blocks items based on a list of exception rules. This detection script relies on a javascript file specifically named to be blocked by these rules. According to this script you have ABP enabled on this page (assuming you're viewing this on something that supports javascript).

Here's the code:

<script type="text/javascript">var hasABP='ABP';</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/advertising.adserver.bannerad.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">pageTracker._setVar(hasABP);</script>


The contents of the file /js/advertising.adserver.bannerad.js are:

var hasABP = '';

So after running this for a few hours, you should spot ABP users as 'ABP' in the Google Analytics User Defined section. In theory you could get some false positives, but the rate reported for me was so low that I think it's performing well.

Once you have some data collected, you can set up Custom Segment in Analytics' Advanced Segments and try and estimate the lost impressions based on page views.

Essential Add-on Tools for Firefox

Any good developer should have a few different browsers installed in order to check things are working properly in all of them. I currently have Firefox 2 and 3, Opera and IE6 installed and have IE7 on another box. I haven't gotten around to installing Chrome yet, but I guess I will have to sooner or later.

Firefox 3 is my browser of choice and here's why:

• Tabbed browsing
  
• Decent rendering engine
  
• Live Bookmarks (Feeds)
  
• Ctrl+U access to Page Source
  
• Useful Add-ons
  

I don't like how much memory Firefox hogs, but it's much better than it used to be and maybe I should curb my tab usage. Sometimes the Shockwave Flash plugin flakes out and won't play until I disable/enable it or restart the browser, but that could also be related to tab usage too.

The following Add-ons are the reason Firefox is the first browser I'll turn to. They are incredibly valuable additions to your development toolbox. You've probably already got many of them installed.

Firebug allows you to "edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page." I couldn't count the number of times I've right-clicked to Inspect Element. It has a tiny footprint in your status bar when you're not using it. This is the best web debugging tool I've used.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

Web Developer adds a toolbar and menu that allow you to manage cookies, CSS, Forms, Images, Outline elements along with a host of other tools. Highlights for me are the Cookie management, Outlining elements (to help debug layout issues) and the Error Console for debugging Javascript.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

NoScript is a security add-on that allows you to protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks by only allowing active content to run from sites that you trust. It's this flexible script blocking approach that also makes it a useful debugging tool. You probably should have it installed to see how borked your sites are - it has a huge user base.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

ScreenGrab lets you save webpages as images. You can grab the whole page or just the visible portion, or even copy it to the clipboard. No more copy+pasting sections together to screenshot a long page.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146

Adblock Plus allows you to browse without ads. It works very well and is incredibly popular because of that. Users love it, advertisers and websites dependant on ad revenue hate it. As long as flash banners keep soaking up CPU cycles, I'll keep using it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

YSlow for Firebug analyzes your web pages and tells you why they're slow (based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites). Some of the criteria is a bit subjective or inapproriate for smaller sites, but generally it offers some good tips.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

SeoQuake SEO extension helps you "deal with search engine optimization(SEO) and internet promotion of web sites." It's possibly a little bloated for some users, but it does cover a lot of bases. It's worth checking out if you're doing any SEO work.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036