Why 80% of e-commerce brands lose money on ads Audit of Cdiscount, PayFit, and Shotgun

Many e-commerce owners and decision-makers think they are profitable because they blindly trust the ROAS displayed on their Business Manager. It is a fatal mistake. This ROAS is an illusion built on truncated data. In reality, they are losing money every day without knowing it.

Losing 30% of your conversion data due to adblockers doesn't just skew your reports. It is a direct catastrophe for the profitability of your AI-driven campaigns (Google Performance Max or Meta Advantage+).

These algorithms feed exclusively on your conversions to know who to target. If a user buys, but the sale is not tracked, the algorithm thinks it failed.

• ▸Inflated acquisition costs (CPA): You pay to retarget users who have already purchased.
• ▸Fatal underbidding: The AI cuts the delivery of your best campaigns because it falsely believes they are unprofitable.
• ▸Destroyed audiences: The algorithms are unable to find new qualified Lookalike profiles.

⚠️ Standard budget leak simulation

With 30% technical loss (Adblockers / ITP)

Even e-commerce leaders can make fatal errors. During our audit, we observed that Cdiscount did try to implement a Server-Side architecture to recover their data. The problem? The execution.

The request sent to their server is blocked instantly by the adblocker (Error net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT). The root cause is a basic naming issue of their Server-Side subdomain (cdtm.cdiscount.com) which has been blacklisted by global lists like EasyPrivacy.

Let's transition to the B2B ecosystem, where financial stakes per Lead are colossal.

Their strategy is formidable. Instead of sending data directly to the ad networks (LinkedIn Ads, Google), they use a stealth proxy (First-Party). When the visitor submits a form, the data is sent to welcome.payfit.com. For an adblocker, this request is perceived as vital to the site's operation, so it isn't blocked (Status 204 No Content).

Even better, they transmit qualified data (e.g., company size "100+"). It is their private server that redistributes this information to the algorithms.

To conclude, technical perfection. Shotgun uses an architecture so advanced that tracking becomes totally invisible to web browsers. Everything happens behind the scenes, via Server-Side Rendering (SSR).

If we dig into the Payload sent by the server, we discover that the user's computer sends no tracking data by itself. It is Shotgun's backend server that does all the work:

1. It formats the price in cents ("amount":2050) because it is the strict format required by ad network APIs.
2. It queries its database to find out who the event belongs to and dynamically retrieves the organizer's "facebookPixelId".

Once this data is prepared, the server communicates directly Server-to-Server (API) with Meta. The user's browser is no longer involved, so the adblocker cannot block anything.