Advertisements are now a part of our life as they surround us in every hook and nook of our life. Starting from our home to smartphones to advertisements out of the home, it’s everywhere. We as a consumer are constantly being bombarded by thousands of ads in a minute. Imagine flipping through a magazine with no ads or watching a television show without any ads. While we can not block or ignore the ads in magazines or tv shows but one can get rid of ads online.
The word “Adblocker” has been heard by many and is a new revolution in the world of online/internet advertising. We will be explaining further what Ad Blocker is and why people use it. Also how it is affecting digital marketers due to Ad Blocker.
What are Ad Blockers?
Ad Blockers, also known as fillers or content filters. It is a simple software program that helps in blocking or filtering out unwanted ads that might otherwise cover the webpage you are visiting or hamper your activity. It is used as a plugin for Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. Ad Blockers are available as an extension which the user needs to download from the respective search engines to use the benefit of AdBlockers.
Ad Blocker is a free extension that is now widely used by more than 65 million users across the globe. It is now also available on YouTube and Pandora.
Why People Use Ad Blockers
As said earlier, ads are bombarded to us on daily basis. An average person sees more than 5000 advertisements daily from various online sources. For consumers, too many ads become confusing and annoying at the same. Below we will see few reasons why so many people use AdBlockers.
- Ads block the content present on the webpage and hinder the activity the user wants to take up. Ads come in the form of Popup ads, display ads, banner ads, etc and these ads many times cover the whole webpage or an application. Some users might want to get the important information but the ads keep blocking the content present. This can lead to poor user experience and the user might bounce back. Therefore, to prevent the ads, people use AdBlockers.
- Ads can lower the load time of the website if it has too many ads. Usually, a website should not take more than 2 secs to load and people with less attention span tend to switch to other websites.
- People think there are too many irrelevant or annoying ads on the internet. Some ads pop out which may not be relevant and useful for the user according to their needs, wants, and desire and in this times the ad might appear annoying to the user.
- Users nowadays are aware of privacy protection and thus many people are switching to AdBlockers to protect their privacy. It is because websites or Html pages use cookies to trace back user’s activity on a webpage and retarget them.
The Problems Ad Blockers Cause for digital marketers
AdBlocker could act as a boon for a user but it stands out to the fact that it is a bane for many marketers especially digital marketers. The main of digital marketers is to advertise the products and services and reach a specific target audience. Considering that now a huge number of users are blocking ads on daily basis coupled with the concern over privacy protection, it becomes a challenge for digital marketers to track their audience and get relevant data out of it. Adblockers block website analytics which makes it a loss for many digital advertisers. They make use of these data to formulate strategies and design campaigns for specific targeting. This disables them to know the engagement of their users on the website, the amount of traffic driven on the website. Moreover, the budget spends on the advertisement may suffer losses which in turn reduces the power of revenue collected.
How to Fight Ad Blockers on the Web
The best way to fight or combat Adblockers on the web is to channel your marketing efforts on all platforms rather than targeting only one specific platform. Invest more in SEO and localized SEO along with paid ads to increase the legitimacy and credibility of your websites.
Another way to fight Adblocker is to ask users to turn off the AdBlocker to continue surfing the website. It simply asks users to either turn off the plugin or uninstall it to get your website whitelisted. You can also use an anti-adblocking plugin in your pages to send notifications to the user using AdBlockers.
Publishers can use another strategy in which they can ask users to either turn off the AdBlocker or subscribe to their newsletter. This can be used by an organization that is revenue-driven. It’s always a smart move to give options to users.
Lastly, one of the smart approaches one can integrate into their marketing strategy is native advertising as it can also help in combating adblockers. Native advertising is also known as sponsored content that matches the form and function of the platform used. Native ads are unobtrusive ads as they don’t tend to block the content and the overall user experience.