Documentation

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Does Nelio track visitors with ad blockers?

While maintaining the privacy of your visitors, with Nelio A/B Testing you can track your visitors in A/B testing and heatmaps.

Internet users mainly use ad blockers to avoid intrusive, interruptive, or repetitive ads. But data privacy concerns also drive some consumers to use ad blockers to prevent tracking.

Our Commitment to Privacy

We respect our customers and our customers’ visitors and value their data privacy. Nelio A/B Testing tracks only anonymous data and we don’t sell nor monetize your visitor’s data. Ever.

Nelio A/B Testing purpose is to help you understand how your visitors interact with your website.

Preventing ad blockers with domain forwarding

Recently, some overzealous ad blocking tools have added our tracking domain (api.nelioabtesting.com) to their list of URLs to block. Then, if a visitor is using an adblocker, Nelio A/B Testing can’t track their events by default. We believe these blocks are unwarranted for the reasons mentioned above.

If you’re worried about your actual visitors using adblockers not being tracked, there’s a setting in our plugin that lets you change the tracking URL. It’s called “Cloud Proxy.”

Settings view of Nelio A/B Testing
Settings view of Nelio A/B Testing.

This setting allows you to bypass adblocking restrictions by setting a different domain to track split testing events:

  • Disabled. Keeps using Nelio’s default domain.
  • REST API. Creates a new endpoint in your WordPress’ REST API.
    Please notice this setting will increase the load of your WordPress server.
    If you’re using a cache plugin or a CDN, please make sure to exclude this endpoint from being cached.
  • Domain Forwarding. Forwards a subdomain on your site to our servers. Nelio A/B Testing will send all events through a subdomain of your WordPress, which is now responsible of forwarding them to Nelio’s cloud.
    Please notice this setting will not increase the load of your WordPress server. For example, let’s say your WordPress site lives on example.com. With domain forwarding, you can set up a new domain (like testing.example.com) as an alias to Nelio’s default tracking domain (api.nelioabtesting.com). This way, all the events triggered by your visitors would be collected by your own domain, nothing will be blocked, and forwarded to our servers. And, more importantly, event tracking would remain independent from your WordPress site.