Ad blocking has become a potent issue for digital marketers who either create ad content or rely on ad revenue. With an arms race of technologies to both block ads and block ad blockers we do risk a game of cat and mouse that’ll be of little value to anyone.
We need to step back and consider what the real force behind the disruption caused by ad blocking actually is. Stop listening to experts who claim that people hate ads and really think about why customers turn to ad blockers. Customers don’t hate ads, but they do hate waiting and how ads interfere with their user experience. They hate ads eating into their battery life and their data plans. These things are all related to performance, not content. If consumers didn’t notice ads slowing down their digital experience, they wouldn’t go to the trouble of spending time and effort to block ads.
The bottom line is people want a better user experience, especially on mobile devices, but also on mobile data plans. But there is another twist to this tale: sometimes it’s not ads that hurt performance, but ad blockers.
This was a finding from a study of how a handful of sites performed with an ad blocker called Pi-Hole, a DNS-based ad blocker. We tested the difference when using or not using ad blocking across a range of sites including retailers, banks, and news sites.
The general finding was that enabling ad-blocking decreased the webpage load time significantly, but not in every case. Several banking sites loaded slower with ad blocking on. Even in the news category, where ad-heavy sites were some of the slowest and ad blocking typically speeds up the user experience, not every site performed better with ad blocking on.
Of course, we might have produced different results using another ad blocker application, but we believe the point is generally true: we should not assume that ad blocking will improve customer experience and in fact the reverse appears to be sometimes true. And certainly ads aren’t the prime reason why a user’s digital experience becomes poor.
The industry needs leadership to focus not on the economic problem of protecting revenue sources, but rather on the customer experience and the performance problem. Bodies like the Internet Advertising Bureau can play a crucial role here and arbitrate, define and enforce standards that ensure ads do not undermine user experience.
However it is clear that the industry needs to respond much faster as consumers aren’t sitting on their hands on this issue. They’re taking action and blocking ads, and if the industry doesn’t wake up and fix this soon, consumers will have already solved it – and not in a fashion that digital marketers want.
The solution is not another tag that detects if a consumer is blocking ads or not. This is a hack that negates the trust that you need to generate in a digital consumer relationship. The real solution here is no more 300 redirects, no more malware, no more blocking of the content while a JavaScript executes. It means more relevant ads and more integrated ads.
None of this is a quick fix, but the critical processes to improve customer experience can be simplified and accelerated through the use of tools to monitor and analyse digital experience, spotting and resolving those flaws that are inadvertently hitting performance for your consumers.
By Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder, Catchpoint Systems.
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