We have all experienced it, and we all hate it. Ads. Numbers speak for themselves. Ad practices need to be changed. Click rates for display ads average at 0.1%, which means only one out of thousand people actually click on a banner-ad type. The rest of the people simply don’t look at them. It is understandable when you know that the average person is served with 1700 banners per month. Crazy! That really shows that our tolerance for ads has decreased drastically. Even with traditional media like TV, with the rise of DVRs, my father-in-law can fast-forward through the commercials during his soccer game.
With diminished attention-span, people want to choose what to look at, and they do get annoyed when distracted from their primary target. In turn, people started to use more and more ad-blockers. Sometimes, for privacy purposes, sometimes because of the overwhelming amount of intrusive and annoying ads they are being exposed to, generating a negative online experience, leading to whitelisting, or simply moving on to something else (no patience).
This why marketers have to work more than ever with behavioural data today. Which 70% of marketers fail to do. But think about this: if my father-in-law would be flooded by ads popping up at the same time he tries to watch his soccer game, would he watch the whole game? At some point, it could get annoying, and he would move to something else.
A Google survey revealed that 69% of people were motivated to install an ad-blocker, 50% of users surveyed said they would not revisit nor recommend a page that had a pop-up ad.
The short answer to all this: don’t annoy people with bad online experience. A big display campaign might be tempting, but you are just going to end up shooting yourself in the foot. People have developed some kind of very selective field of vision and can decide to not look at your annoying big 3/4 screen-ad. While a Google survey revealed that 69% of people were motivated to install an ad-blocker, and more than half users surveyed said they would not revisit or recommend a page that had a pop-up ad. Here are the newest best practices for online ads from a study published this month.
Here is a very neat infographic from our friends at Google recapping the do’s and don’t of ad-format.
Source: www.thinkwithgoogle.com
While some of these might sound pretty obvious, you can cross-reference them with this very interesting behavioural data study put together by the Coalition for Better Ads about user experience data.
Mobile traffic now accounts for more than 50% of all web traffic, and mobile advertising has increased 87% over the past five years. Optimising mobile ad displays.
On this note, mobile traffic now accounts for more than 50% of all web traffic, and mobile advertising has increased 87% over the past 5 years. Display real-estate is much more sensitive. Optimising mobile ad displays, and, that goes without saying, your website, should be a priority.
Table of Contents
Ad practices take-aways
Ad formats can (and will) hurt you.
Like shown in this infographic, something has to be said about ad-density. If the ad is over 30% in density, meaning covers approximately a 1/3 of the screen, then it is too intrusive and provides negative online-experience. Most likely the user will skip the page altogether and move-on to something else. Understandably, if the ad is THAT big it is distracting from the experience, then the page is obviously serving itself and not the user. Then what’s in it for the user? This applies to mobile and desktop displays.
Big no-no’s: pop-ups, large sticky ads, and auto-playing video ads
People just don’t have the attention span nor the time to wait and be forced to watch an ad. Either they will skip it, or if they can’t, they will close the window and resume there search on a different site. Again, a distractive experience is a negative one, for the viewer, but eventually for the publisher.
Bonus: how to approach people using ad-blockers
Like mentioned before, people use ad-blockers for different reasons. This only means if your ad is non-compliant, then you’re just spending money an ad that is never seen. Here are some tips on how to engage people using ad-blockers:
- Remove negative ad experiences from your site — Learn more here;
- Learn more about why people use ad blockers;
- Design your whitelist requests around your audience, not around you. This can be with a message telling your audience that ads support the viability of your site;
- Plan your strategy with whitelist requests, article counters, or paywalls;
- Monitor how people respond with these implementations.
People use ad-blockers for different reasons. This only means if your ad is non-compliant, then you’re just spending money an ad that is never seen.
The essential thing to remember is to respect your audience’s time. To make it around them instead of you shows them your site is really worth supporting — even with ads.
*Originally published in The Startup