Ad blockers are eating a chunk of our Shopify tracking, any first-party option?
I have been comparing event counts from our Shopify storefront against the server logs and there is a consistent gap, roughly 12 percent of sessions produce no events at all. The pattern points to content blockers: the missing sessions skew heavily toward desktop Firefox and Brave.
Before I dig further, could someone confirm whether the Croct tracking endpoints are on the common blocklists, and whether there is a supported first-party option to route around this? I would rather fix it properly than accept the gap
2 answers
Your diagnosis is right. EasyList and EasyPrivacy block the /client/web/evaluate, /client/web/track, and /content paths, so any browser running a blocker with those lists will drop exactly the traffic you are describing. Desktop Firefox and Brave skewing high matches the typical blocker install base.
The supported remedy is first-party proxying. The plug configuration exposes baseEndpointUrl and cidAssignerEndpointUrl, so you point both at a path on your own domain and proxy the requests through it. Blockers filter by third-party host, so requests to your own origin pass through.
Set up the proxy on your storefront domain, flip the two options, and your gap should close to near zero within a day.
Worth stating the wider implication: this is not a Croct-specific problem, ad blockers silently exclude traffic from any client-side tool, and the excluded users are not a random sample. If you run experiments on the unproxied setup, your results are skewed toward blocker-free browsers before you even start. Proxying first-party fixes the measurement, not just the counts, so do it before your next test rather than after.