Content blockers + Google Analytics maybe killing your conversions

  • 2 December 2015
  • 6 replies
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Just wanted to give folks a heads up that iOS content blockers like Purify + Google Analytics may be breaking your form. There are no error messages displayed to the user. Simply nothing happens when the user hits submit. Eventually users give up and walk away. 

In our case, we only found out because a user was kind enough to notify us via Twitter that they were unable to request our eBook using this form:

http://see.rybbon.net/how-to-send-send-instant-holiday-gifts-using-marketo/

 
When we tested internally, it worked on some iOS devices and not others. The only difference we could think of was the Purify content blocker installed on some of them. When we turned off Purify, the form worked on all of our test devices.

Unbounce support has confirmed the behavior and says the problem is due to Google Analytics:

I chatted with our team about the best way around this, and basically what happens is the content blocker prevents Google Analytics from tracking behaviour, which then blocks our form from submitting. Your best bet to get this resolved quickly is to turn off event tracking with GA, as this is the portion that the content blocker is blocking.
For now, we’ve simply turned off GA entirely and the form seems to be working even with Purify turned on.

I suspect lots of Unbounce conversions may be affected by this issue given the popularity of content blockers on iOS 9. 

 


6 replies

Bumping this to see if Unbounce folks are aware of any potential issues. If your findings are correct, it could become a larger issue as more people use ad blockers.

I agree. This could become a pervasive issue. A very concerning aspect is that it is ‘silent’ conversion killer - there are no symptoms or error messages to the user or to the Unbounce admin.

Userlevel 3

Hey Jignesh

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. This does look like an issue specifically with our GA script template in script manager.

Our script is likely not handling or falling back to the default behaviour if GA becomes blocked.

Rest assured this is on our radar and we plan to update the script to better handle these conditions soon.

As our support suggested, we recommend turning it off on your pages for now until we have fully addressed the issue.

In the meantime just dropping in the default GA tracking script from your GA account should be safe and give you the basic tracking (although without button/form event tracking)

Thanks for the information…
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I have been experiencing a lot of problems with 404s reported by Google Adwords and diminishing conversions. Noah and the development team are working on the 404s but as of 2 days ago, Adwords is not picking up on converted clicks. They report zero conversion and the script has not been modified. Is this somehow related?
All help is much appreciated.

Did you turn off this functionality for all unbounce accounts? Is this why I don’t see any conversions reported on Adwords?

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