Feature launch: Custom domains reduce data loss from ad blockers

Ad blockers and strict content security policies make gathering comprehensive customer event data hard. They can lead to loss of attribution, disrupted customer experiences, and gaps in understanding user behavior.

But it just got easier to jump over these data collection hurdles. Our new custom subdomain feature makes it easy to configure personalized domains for your event pipelines to enhance data quality and security. It enables you to capture more events even when ad blockers are present.

The issue: Data loss from ad blockers

Over 37% of people now use ad blockers to drive a better browsing experience, but these tools can also block crucial tracking events from making it downstream into your analytics and business tools. Data loss from ad blockers hampers your ability to gain insights into the customer journey, and it can ruin the on-page experience, leaving your customers feeling frustrated.

Similarly, content security policies (CSPs) impose limitations on loading scripts. While intended to protect against malicious attacks, CSPs can block vital analytics scripts, and obtaining exceptions for certain domains is time-consuming.

Ultimately, the consequences of data loss – such as lack of attribution and incomplete insights – impact ROI for data initiatives. These headwinds can force you to resort to workarounds such as DIY reverse proxies or custom server-side forwarding of events, but these solutions are time-consuming and unreliable.

DIY solutions often demand deep network knowledge, involve coding and maintenance, and introduce risks such as reliability issues and security vulnerabilities. Additionally, DIY solutions impact your ability to scale because they divert valuable resources from core business functions. That’s why we’re introducing our new custom domains feature.

The solution: Implementing custom domains

Our new custom domains capability enables you to configure a custom subdomain for your event data pipeline in minutes. With a custom subdomain, you can bypass ad blockers and meet the requirements of CSPs without any additional effort.

Once implemented, your events are seamlessly sent to subdomain.yourdomain.com. Rudderstack handles SSL certificates, DNS routing configuration, and setting up the content delivery network. All you have to do is add a few DNS entries for your domain.

The impact: Improved data quality and reduced engineering workload

By implementing custom domains with RudderStack, you’ll be able to focus on delivering meaningful insights instead of compensating for missing data, and every team will thank you:

• Engineering won’t have to spend time coordinating and implementing workarounds.
• Marketing will get better attribution and complete customer journey analytics.
• Product can act on better insights, trusting that their data is comprehensive and accurate.
• Most importantly, every customer will have a consistent and secure experience interacting with your brand's domains rather than relying on a third-party domain to load properly.

If you’re looking for a better way to overcome the data collection hurdles presented by ad blockers and content security policies, check out the documentation to learn more and schedule a demo with our team today.