Information

Explanation

Our CNAME relay function is an advanced feature using the latest technologies to circumvent the increasingly common methods utilized by browsers and extensions to block or limit the functionality of third party trackers. You should be familiar with what DNS and CNAME means:

The Domain Name System (DNS) protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup.

A CNAME record is a type of DNS record that maps an alias name to a domain name. CNAME records are typically used to map a subdomain to the domain hosting that subdomain’s content.

What this means in context of our CNAME relay feature is: we provide advanced CNAME records that will essentially mean the browser will no longer see requests to Squeezely.tech, but rather to a subdomain of your own choosing. So if your website is domain.com, a request would normally go to squeezely.tech/tracker.

However, now it will go to sub.domain.com. The DNS records (which is something not visible for browsers by default) will then forward the request and return the same data as normal, but all of the network requests in the browser will show your own domain. This means the vast majority of tracking prevention methods will not recognise this as a request to Squeezely but think it is just internal data loading.

Benefits

• Several popular extensions and browser settings block third party trackers, sometimes this includes Squeezely. By implementing CNAME relay, you will receive more front-end data for more unique users, this can vary from 10 to 30 percent more data depending on the type of user and technology used.

• For users that are currently being tracked, the cookie is sometimes limited, meaning sessions after a length of time will not appear on their original profile as they have a new cookie. By CNAME relay, the cookie is placed by what the browser thinks is a first party script. This means the cookie duration is longer, and therefor you can track users over a longer period of time in the same profile.

• Your SEO ranking can also be improved as some search engine’s methods of calculating the website performance consider the amount of third party scripts being loaded in relevant for your score.

Visualisation

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Open

Implementation

Creating a subdomain

The first step is creating a subdomain. When you choose your subdomain, it is best to avoid names as ad, tracker or squeezely. The rest is free to choose.

Set your subdomain in Squeezely at Settings > ITP Relay;

Next you will receive the information from Squeezely to use in the DNS settings of your new subdomain. Use these or give these values to the one who will configure the DNS for you.

Click on Validate DNS to check directly if your DNS settings are correctly configured. If everything went well, you will see the following screen.

From that moment forward we will redirect our tracker from your subdomain.

You can check this on the site when going to the Developers tools, by clicking inspect on te page or use F12. On the Network tab, you can search for “sq” and lookup the tracker. Normally you would see squeezely.tech as a domain, this will be replaced by your own subdomain.

Verify and implement the new tracker URL

Once above steps are completed (keep in mind DNS changes can take a while to sync), you should be able to verify if it worked by going to Settings => Setup guide => Show snippet. You will see the base tracker code URL you have currently implemented, eg:

You then replace squeezely.tech by the earlier chosen subdomain, eg:

You can also manually visit both the original and the replaced URL in your browser, if the replaced URL also shows Javascript code the DNS forwarding has successfully worked. In that case, you can replace the URL in your existing implementation, for example in your GTM tag.

Without doing so, the data we return will still contain the new URL but the initial request might still be blocked on the user’s end so this is important!