Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / Marketing Automation Ignores Customer Content Blockers
Transcript
- Lucas: Let me start with a number that stopped me this morning: more than forty percent of internet users now run some form of content blocker. Ad blocker, tracker blocker, script blocker—pick your flavor. And the vast majority of marketing automation systems are completely blind to that fact. Luna: That's a huge blind spot. I've got an ad blocker on my browser and I never think about it—but if I'm a customer in a HubSpot workflow, what's actually breaking? Lucas: Almost everything that relies on the open web's standard tracking infrastructure. Email open pixels, retargeting cookies, conversion pixels. If you're running a classic nurture sequence that sends an email, waits for a click, then serves a retargeting ad—that second step just evaporates for a blocker user. Luna: Right. And if the automation platform never gets the signal, it assumes the person isn't engaging. You might drop them from the sequence or move them to a lower-priority bucket. Lucas: Exactly. So today I want to drill into one specific failure mode: the retargeting pixel that never fires. It's a problem that's been quietly growing for years, but I think 2026 is the year marketers can no longer ignore it. Because browsers are killing third-party cookies anyway, and blockers just accelerate the timeline. Lucas: Let me set up a concrete case. Imagine a B2B SaaS company—call it CloudSync—running a Marketo program. They send a whitepaper download offer. The user clicks, downloads, and Marketo fires a conversion event. That event triggers a retargeting pixel from their ad platform. Standard stuff. Luna: But if that user has an ad blocker, the pixel request never reaches the ad server. Marketo thinks the conversion succeeded, the ad platform sees nothing, and the user sees zero follow-up ads. The automation system logs it as a conversion, but the customer journey has a silent gap. Lucas: And that gap compounds. Because the user might be highly engaged—they downloaded the whitepaper, they're reading it—but the system treats them as someone who only did one thing and then disappeared. It might drop them from the sequence or send a generic re-engagement email that feels tone-deaf. Luna: Speaking of which, I want to note something. We're able to have these detailed marketing conversations without any ads interrupting. That's intentional. If you find value in the deep dives we do here and want to support keeping it that way, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just if it's useful to you. Lucas: Appreciate that. Back to the gap: the real kicker is that most platforms don't even surface this as a metric. Marketo won't tell you 'Your retargeting pixel was blocked in 18% of conversions.' HubSpot's analytics dashboard doesn't show a 'blocker-affected' segment. The data simply isn't collected. Luna: So how do you even diagnose the problem? If you don't know which customers are using blockers, you're building campaigns on incomplete assumptions. Lucas: You can do a few things. First, you can measure the discrepancy between email open rates—which rely on pixels—and actual click-through rates. If open rates are suspiciously low but click rates are stable, that's a clue. Second, you can compare server-side events, like a form submission, with client-side events like a pixel fire. The gap tells you something. Lucas: Some companies are moving to server-side tracking. The Atlantic, for example, started routing their ad calls through their own domain about five years ago. That makes it harder for blocklists to catch the requests because they look like first-party traffic. But it's not perfect—some blockers now use machine learning to detect that pattern too. Luna: So it's an arms race. And meanwhile, the customer experience suffers. Someone who's interested in your product gets treated like a disengaged lead. Lucas: Right. And there's a second-order effect: the data you feed into your attribution models is wrong. If you can't see the ad impressions that didn't happen, you can't properly credit the channels that actually drove the conversion. Your last-click attribution might overvalue search and undervalue display, simply because display was invisible. Luna: That's a big deal for budget allocation. If you're spending fifty thousand dollars a month on retargeting and twenty percent of your audience never sees the ads, you're effectively burning ten grand. Lucas: And the platform doesn't tell you. The ad platform reports impressions served, but those impressions didn't actually render. Google and Meta have started reporting 'measurable impressions' and 'viewable impressions' but those are based on their own tags, which blockers also block. So the numbers are always overstated. Lucas: I want to give a specific number from a study I came across. In a test run by the ad-tech company AdGuard in Q4 of last year, they found that on a site with a standard ad blocker, retargeting pixels from Google Ads fired only sixty-two percent of the time compared to a control group without blockers. That's a thirty-eight percent failure rate. Luna: Nearly forty percent drop in tracked conversions. That's not a rounding error. That's a fundamental break in the data pipeline. Lucas: And for marketing automation, that means every downstream action that depends on that pixel—every email triggered by an ad interaction, every score-based lead reassignment—is built on a foundation of silence. The system works, but the signal is missing. Luna: What about email open tracking? Pixels in emails get blocked too, especially by Apple's Mail Privacy Protection which loads content remotely. So open rates are already unreliable. Lucas: Yeah, Apple's change in late 2021 was a huge shift. But that's a privacy feature built into the email client. Blockers are a separate layer—they strip out tracking pixels even before the email client loads. So you get a double whammy: the user might have Mail Privacy Protection on, plus an ad blocker, plus a tracker blocker. The system sees nothing. Lucas: The solution isn't to try to bypass blockers—that's a cat and mouse game that erodes trust. The better approach is to redesign the automation logic to rely less on passive signals and more on active ones. Things like form submissions, account sign-ups, support ticket creation, purchase events. Those happen server-side and are much harder to block. Luna: So shift from 'they opened an email' to 'they performed an action.' That changes the whole sequence design. Lucas: Exactly. And it also means you need to be more creative about how you get that active signal. Instead of a retargeting ad, maybe you send a follow-up email that says 'We noticed you downloaded the whitepaper—want to schedule a demo?' That email doesn't need a pixel to know the user engaged. If they click the link, you get a server-side event. Luna: But that still depends on the user clicking. What if they don't click? You're back to guessing. Lucas: True. But the alternative—relying on pixels that we know are blocked a third of the time—is worse. At least with active signals, when you get them, you know they're real. And you can design time-based triggers: if someone downloads a resource and doesn't click anything in seven days, send a different message. But that message doesn't assume they ignored you—it assumes you don't have data. Lucas: I think the biggest shift we'll see in the next twelve to eighteen months is marketing automation platforms building in first-party data layers that don't depend on the client side at all. HubSpot already offers a 'conversations' API that logs interactions from chat and email replies. Marketo has webhooks that can fire server to server. The infrastructure exists—it's just not the default. Luna: So the fix is more about configuration than new technology. Marketers need to audit their workflows and ask: which signals are coming from the browser, and which are coming from the server? Lucas: Right. And if a signal comes from the browser, assume it might not arrive. Build fallback logic. For example, if a retargeting pixel fails, the automation platform should still have a backup trigger—like a time delay—to keep the sequence moving. Don't let a blocked pixel stall a customer journey. Luna: That's a concrete takeaway. Audit your workflows this week. Check which events are client-side and add server-side backups. Lucas: One more thing: if you're using a platform like LinkedIn or Facebook for retargeting, those environments have their own tracking inside the app that isn't subject to browser blockers. So you can still reach users there, but it's a different audience—it's the users who are on the platform, not your site. Luna: So the lesson is: don't assume the technology works. Assume it fails and design for that failure. Lucas: Yeah. And that's actually a healthier mindset for marketing automation in general. The tools are powerful, but they're only as good as the signals they receive. If you don't account for the blockers, you're building a house on sand.