Recent changes in ad and content blocking technology may cause your marketing website to function incorrectly. Your tracking metrics may not accurately reflect website traffic, and you could be missing valuable leads.
Key issues
Ad blockers can interfere with your gates in three separate ways:
Tag management platforms, such as Google Tag Manager, are blocked. If you include the Formulayt script through such a platform, it may fail to load.
Tracking scripts from marketing platforms such as Eloqua are blocked. This can cause pre-population to fail.
Domains associated with marketing platforms such as Eloqua are blocked. This means form submissions may fail to complete successfully as they often route through these domains.
Important: Adblockers do not directly target the Formulayt domain. They interfere with gates and form submissions by targeting supporting services such as Google Tag Manager or Eloqua. You would experience these same issues if you use these platforms, regardless of whether you also use Formulayt.
Background
Starting with Firefox 65 (January 2019), users have three content blocking modes. Users who opt for "strict" mode automatically block most tag management tools like Google Tag Manager, Tealium, and Adobe Tag Manager. Browser extensions like Ghostery and browsers like Brave provide similar blocking functionality.
The impact is significant:
Standard analytics injected through tag management may not record page hits and user interactions
Websites relying on style sheets injected through these tools may display incorrectly
Layouts may default to browser base standards
Mobile responsive capability could be lost
Components might fail to display entirely
Ad blockers like Ad Block Plus and uBlock also block tag managers and other technologies depending on user settings.
Less obvious issues include:
AJAX requests returning unexpected results
Forms posting data that gets blocked, resulting in lost lead information
Most blocking is based on domain name or by matching elements of the path and filename of requested resources. The rules are often maintained as public resources such as EasyList (https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt).
While you might circumvent some blocked resources by hosting them on your own domain, other resources like tag manager output cannot currently be loaded via alternative domains. Some browsers like Brave will block certain marketing scripts even if hosted on alternative domains.
Solutions for using Formulayt with ad blockers
Do not use tag managers to inject the Formulayt Script. Instead, follow best practice guidelines to ensure gates load correctly even with ad blockers.
Use a custom domain mapped to your Marketing Automation Platform account for all form submissions.
Utilize Formulayt's built-in failed form submission detection to display a warning message to affected users.
Adblocker detection in Formulayt
Provided the Formulayt script loads successfully into a user's browser (see above), Formulayt CAN detect if a form submission has been blocked by the browser or ad blocker. As discussed above this primarily occurs when sending to a Marketing Automation platform (e.g Eloqua and Marketo), but could also occur for other transient issues.
When Formulayt detects a failed submission it presents a message to the user encouraging them to disable ad blockers or white-list the site. The thank you message or any content delivery is NOT shown to encourage the user to try again. This method of detection, 'correct and re-try' improves form conversion rates and reduces lost data.
Detection capabilities
Failed form submission detection is only enabled when using our standard form submission method (FETCH) or performing an API based submission (e.g. Marketo or Hubspot). If your account has been configured to use legacy submissions (POST), failed form submissions cannot be detected.
The Fetch API can detect failed submissions caused by:
Ad blockers
Browser privacy settings
Server downtime
Internet connection or other connectivity issues
The Fetch API cannot detect failed submissions caused by:
Validation rules on the receiving platform causing submission rejection
Routing problems on the receiving end
Receiving forms being deleted
Other issues that occur on the receiving platform after submission receipt
The message displayed for failed submissions can be customised and translated. Contact Formulayt for more information.
Tracking failed submissions
You can use the Formulayt event management area to track failed submissions, including those potentially caused by adblockers using the "Submission failed" event (under "Form events").
The "Last submission failure reason" data source can help identify the cause of failed submissions. Some reasons for failed submissions are directly visible to Formulayt, e.g. when a CAPTCHA check fails. For everything else, including ad-blockers, the reason will be "Unknown form submission error". Use the code below to react to these types of failed submissions:
/* Track failed form submissions that were potentially caused by ad blockers */
if (gcdc.getValue("formAttribute.lastSubmissionFailureReason") === "Unknown form submission error") {
// Raise an event to your tracking platform or
// undertake another action
}
Note: if the reason for the failure was an ad blocker, your Google Analytics or other tracking platform may also be blocked. You could therefore pass these events to a custom endpoint on your own server.
Below is the list of possible failed form submission reasons:
Unknown form submission error
Failed to retrieve Eloqua submission token
Webhooks CAPTCHA validation failed
Webhooks submission error
Salesforce CAPTCHA validation failed
Salesforce submission error
Salesforce Marketing Cloud CAPTCHA validation failed
Salesforce Marketing Cloud submission error
Marketo forms iframe unavailable
Marketo forms validation failed
Marketo forms JS API error
Marketo forms serverside form missing
HubSpot submission error