Carrefour Addictions Case Study: Measuring Social Impact in an Ultra-Sensitive Environment (Privacy-First)

In Brief: Key Figures (over 90 days)

• Recovered Traffic: +31.2% total visibility (AdBlockers + ITP).

• The Major Challenge: 76.8% cookie refusal (Opt-out) on viewed pages.

• The A-Track Contribution: Maintaining public utility statistics despite massive refusal.

1. The Context: Privacy as a Vital Need

Carrefour Addictions is the entry point in the Geneva canton for issues related to addictions (alcohol, gambling, screens, drugs). Visitors to this site are not looking to buy a product. They are seeking help, often in situations of distress or shame.

Direct consequence: Anonymity is their absolute priority. The data speaks for itself:

• 76.83% of visitors explicitly refuse tracking (Opt-out) or browse in “Do Not Track” mode.

• 14.5% use draconian AdBlockers (compared to 3-5% on a typical e-commerce site).

The Problem: For a subsidized foundation, it is crucial to justify its public utility.

• How many people have we directed?

• Which themes (Alcohol? Screens?) are on the rise? With standard tracking (Client-Side), Carrefour Addictions was navigating in the fog, losing track of nearly 80% of its potential beneficiaries.

2. The Solution: Ethical and Secure Tracking

For this project, A-Track's goal was not advertising targeting, but the sanctuarization of statistical data.

We deployed a Server-Side Tracking architecture with a dual objective:

1. Bypass technical obstacles (Safari, Firefox, AdBlockers) to count actual visits.

2. Respect user choice while modeling overall activity.

3. Data Analysis: What We Could No Longer See

Over a 90-day period and 75,000 requests, the Server-Side infrastructure revealed the extent of the “Signal Loss.”

A. Technical Recovery (+31%)

Without Server-Side, standard analysis tools would have missed:

• 7.53% of traffic blocked by AdBlockers.

• 23.76% of traffic throttled by protection mechanisms (Safari ITP, Firefox ETP).

The Insight: More than 31% of the actual audience was “technically recovered.” For an NGO, this represents thousands of people helped who did not appear in annual activity reports.

B. The “Cookie Keeper”: Understanding the Care Pathway

In the field of addiction, the pathway is long. A person comes to inquire, leaves, and returns 3 weeks later. Browsers like Safari (widely used on mobile) delete cookies after 7 days, making each visitor “new” every time.

Thanks to the Cookie Keeper feature of our infrastructure, we restored 99.96% of technical identifiers impacted by ITP.

• The Benefit: This allows us to see recurrence (Retention): do people return to seek help? Without this, reports would artificially display 100% new visitors, skewing the understanding of the care pathway.

4. The Consent Challenge: Navigating with 77% Refusal

This is the specificity of this case. On an e-commerce site, the refusal rate hovers around 30%. Here, it skyrockets to 76.8%.

How to measure effectiveness when the user says “No”?

A-Track's “Privacy-First” Approach:

1. Strict Respect: When a user refuses (Opt-out), no advertising pixel (Meta/Google Ads) is triggered for remarketing. This is an ethical and legal red line (nFADP).

2. Anonymized Measurement: However, Server-Side allows counting the “Page View” or “Click Orientation” event in a strictly anonymous manner (without IP, without persistent ID), to feed global statistics.

3. ScriptLoad Recovery: Data shows that 20.15% of script loads were blocked by AdBlockers. By loading them from our server (First-Party), we ensure that the site functions correctly for everyone, without “breaking” the user experience.

Conclusion: Data for the Common Good

This case demonstrates that advanced tracking is not reserved for online sales. For NGOs, Foundations, Hospitals, and the Public Sector, the challenge is to measure their real impact on the population.

In a sector where users hide (rightly so), only a Server-Side infrastructure can reconcile Anonymity (Visitor Protection) and Statistics (Organization Management).