A recent study by the marketing technology company AudienceProject shows that ad blockers in UK and US block ads to avoid irrelevant ads and that their attitude towards ads would be positively affected if they were exposed to relevant ads
Ad blocking keeps challenging the advertising ecosystem affecting especially publishers whose business depends on ad revenue. However, a recent study by the marketing technology company AudienceProject suggest how to curb the tendency towards an increased use of ad blocking.
When looking at why UK and US ad blockers are blocking ads, the study shows that two main reasons stand out. First, they find websites more manageable without banners. Among the UK population, 31% point at this as a reason for blocking ads, while this is the case with 34% of the US population. Secondly, they want to avoid offensive and irrelevant ads. In UK and US respectively 31% and 30% are blocking ads because of this.
The annoyance with irrelevant ads is furthermore supported by the fact that the attitude towards ads among the UK and US ad blockers would be positively affected by more personalized ads.
Among the ad blockers in UK, 34% say that their attitude towards ads would be affected in a positive way if the ads displayed relevant messages, while just 27% would be affected in a negative way. And in US they would be even more positively affected by personalized ads. While just 19% would be affected in a negative way, as many as 44% would be affected positively by ads displaying relevant messages.
Jacob Lachmann, CEO at AudienceProject, says “In this study, we get proof that ad blockers are tired of being exposed to ads without any personal relevance. Advertisers and publishers simply need to address this problem by taking a more data driven approach to advertising making it possible to serve more personalized ads with relevant messages.”
And Lachmann continues:
“The results of this study should rather be seen as an opportunity than a threat. Just as the right editorial content leads to higher engagement, more relevant ads leads to higher engagement and greater acceptance of the commercial content. Applying demographic data to online campaigns will decrease the number of irrelevant ads significantly resulting in less users being annoyed and more users going to uninstall their ad blockers.”
AudienceProject has detected that 26% in UK and 23% in US use ad blocking on their desktop, while 2% in both UK and US are blocking ads on their mobile.
You can download the study at this link: https://www.audienceproject.com/blog/key-insights/new-study-uk-us-ad-blockers-want-relevant-ads
About the study
The study about ad blocking in UK and US is a part of a larger device study by AudienceProject with data collected through online surveys done in Q3 2016. The respondents have been selected from AudienceProject’s UK and US panel of 350.000 panelists and weighted to achieve representativity on the more than 2.200 respondents who completed the survey.
About AudienceProject
AudienceProject has its roots in market research, technology and large scale data. It helps brands, agencies, publishers and e-commerce companies identify, target and validate audiences. The products range from audience planning, validation and targeting on socio-demographics as well as other variables.
