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Are ad-blockers and browser extensions quietly tanking your attribution models and inflating your digital ad costs? The short answer is yes. The long answer, as a growing chorus of Indian adtech experts will tell you, is far more insidious.
Pulkit Narayan, Founder and CEO of DangleAds Technologies, puts it plainly. “Ad-blockers and privacy-focused browser extensions are creating invisible blind spots in attribution models. These tools suppress pixels, block tracking scripts and prevent impressions or clicks from being properly recorded. The result is that campaigns appear underperforming, ROI metrics become distorted and significant parts of the customer journey go unaccounted for.”
And that blind spot is getting bigger As of late 2024, nearly 50% of Indian internet users are now employing ad blockers, with the number skewing even higher among mobile users. Globally, over 64% of ad-blocking activity now happens on mobile, further complicating attribution, especially for performance-focused advertisers.
Yaron Tomchin, CEO of Mobupps, warns that marketers often don’t even realise the extent of the impact. “By blocking ad impressions, click trackers, and even entire scripts related to analytics and attribution, these tools can severely distort the visibility brands have into the customer journey. A user may engage with an ad or visit a site through a campaign, but if attribution pixels or cookies are blocked, the resulting action appears either ‘organic’ or unattributed altogether.”
The consequence? Misguided optimisation and misallocated budgets. As Tomchin points out, “Marketers may underfund channels that are working or overinvest in channels that look good only because their measurement pipelines are less disrupted.”
The hidden cost isn’t just invisible clicks. It’s confidence. Attribution metrics, once the gospel for campaign success, are now increasingly regarded as approximations. Safari, Firefox and now Chrome have all tightened restrictions on third-party cookies. Meanwhile, private browsing, VPNs, and ad-blockers are making a sizable chunk of user activity untrackable.
Bala Kumaran, Founder of BrandStory, doesn’t mince words. “Think of it as dark matter warping the universe of data—20-30% of your audience is invisible, their behaviour cloaked by tools like uBlock or Privacy Badger. Attribution models today are built on a foundation of self-deception.” He points to India’s DPDP Act and its “right to erase” as accelerants, likening the result to a “statistical hallucination.”
That hallucination comes with a price tag. According to Kumaran, India’s privacy-aware users have helped create a new reality. “That ?500 CPM for ‘targeted’ ads? It’s a 30% tax on your ignorance.”
There’s also a structural chokehold. As Kumaran observes, “Google and Meta own the kaccha roads to your customers. Walled gardens equal to Digital Zamindars.” Good luck tracking a UPI transaction across PhonePe, Paytm and BHIM. Your attribution model is toast.
The big takeaway from all this isn’t just that attribution is broken. It’s that brands need to stop treating browser-based tracking as gospel. As Narayan notes, “Marketers are optimizing based on incomplete data without realising that a significant slice of the audience is invisible to their measurement stack.”
In practical terms, this means moving away from pixel-based tracking and last-click attribution toward probabilistic models, server-side tracking, and media mix modelling. Tomchin adds, “Even the best efforts can only partially compensate for the systemic signal loss. Many brands are recalibrating expectations, treating attribution data as directional rather than definitive.”
Rupak Ved, CBO and CEO-Media at LS Digital, sees an even deeper shift coming. “With LLMs increasingly taking the place of native research behaviours, browser extensions and ad-blockers will soon render themselves obsolete,” he says. The real risk isn’t just poor attribution, it’s invisibility. “Brands that are solely dependent on lower-funnel models are going out of business,” he warns. “We need to transition to server-side measurement, incrementality, and media mix modelling to remain truly consumer-connected.”
In other words: It’s time to zoom out. Abhilash Madabhushi, Founder of Consuma AI, believes marketers need to rethink measurement entirely. “Ad-blockers, privacy-first browser extensions, and the slow but steady death of third-party cookies are silently reshaping how campaign performance is tracked. The goal now is not just to track views or clicks, but to understand how audiences are feeling about a campaign across platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter.”
Madabhushi advocates a phased measurement model—pre-launch, mid-launch, and post-launch—combined with digital ethnography to understand brand sentiment in real time. “These are the kinds of insights that don’t get picked up in traditional attribution, but heavily influence brand momentum and consumer intent.”
Back in the trenches, Narayan notes that despite the chaos, marketers are adapting. “We’re seeing a shift toward first-party data, server-side tracking and newer attribution models that don’t rely so heavily on cookies or third-party scripts. That is definitely a step toward regaining trust in the numbers.”
But it’s a cautious confidence. As Kumaran points out, “Survival means thinking like a dabbawala, not a data scientist.”
So, is attribution dead? Not quite. But if you’re still relying on third-party cookies and a clean analytics dashboard, you’re measuring the world through a cracked lens. The data you see is partial. The truth, as always, is harder to track.
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