Ad blockers are here to stay. NO amount of moaning or grumbling or whining will change that fact. It doesn’t matter that advertisers the world over spent years discovering where their consumers played, shopped, and browsed. Nor that marketing experts dissected the living daylights out of mobile and crunched numbers until their fingers bled. None of that will turn back the clock, to a time before the launch of iOS 9 with its search and display ad blocking capabilities for smartphones.
It’s expected the next twelve months will reveal the depth to which mobile ad blocking has impacted revenue. Companies who’ve invested in mobile marketing campaigns can wait around with fingers crossed, hoping, hoping, hoping they’re still afloat by mid-2017, or they can be proactive about implementing change.
It boils down to this. Across the board, the advertising industry must step up their game if they want consumers to block less. That means getting serious about creating ads that people want to see, that viewers won’t chose to remove. Follow these strategies to get headed in the right direction.
1. R-E-S-P-E-C-T
First and foremost, your strategic needs to be centered around respect for the consumer. That means being mindful of the timing of ads so they don’t interrupt app content. An ad that appears during a break in app activity will obviously be seen as less annoying. Note that a memorable, positive engagement is more likely when the viewer’s happiness and attention levels have peaked.
2. Seek to be relevant
A big key to surviving the ad blocking war will be to ensure ads are completely relevant to the website where they appear. For instance, placing ads for child video-monitoring equipment on a children’s clothing website makes perfect sense. Placing such ads on a pro fishing site would fall under the annoying-and-likely-to-be-blocked category. Talk about a negative, frustrating, not to mention exhausting experience to have one irrelevant ad after another pop up. It’s within your power to make sure that doesn’t happen.
3. Speed up load time
It’s a fact – more ads equal slower loading times on a mobile browser. This is especially troubling for those with limited data plans. The appeal of pages that quickly load because they aren’t weighted down by ads is quite understandable. No wonder people are flocking to get ad blockers. The bottom line? Optimize your content so that it will enhance and add value to the user experience rather than create frustration and leave a negative impression.
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