If you are a business owner, this question would have surely popped up in your mind. In most cases, it is assumed that advertisements negatively affect the user experience. However, ads play an important role in helping publishers monetize, and customers find relevant products.
So how can ads actually hurt user experience?
Let us establish that the ways ads are displayed are the issue rather than the ads themselves. In several surveys and studies conducted, web users have said that they don’t mind seeing ads as long as they’re not intrusive or invasive of their privacy.
But how can you and your marketing team find the right balance while ensuring a high ROI?
Here are some key points to be kept in mind:
1-Engage with Context:
Your website must serve ads that are relevant to your user’s interests. A sports equipment review site serving ads for cooking equipment, rather than tennis rackets, for example, would be inefficient and wasteful. Serving relevant ads to users will help them make a decision after they’re done reading your equipment reviews.
Relevant ads drive better engagement for your business!
The end-user will only be attracted by relevant ads and ignore the rest. Contextual ads will bring you higher engagement while resulting in healthier click-through-rates. Contextual advertising offers smooth & native ad placement designed to be in sync with the original content while following the flow of the UX.
With real and actionable insights into audience preferences, you can optimize the timing and format of your ads to yield the best results. Contextual advertising optimization also has technical benefits. Contextual ads load quicker and are less disruptive to users who want to browse your site, yielding higher user retention and ensuring that your site’s visitors will return.
2-Keep it Light:
Always keep in mind the number of ads being shown on a certain page.
Overpopulating a web page with ads could drive users away. It’s not just about the number of ads, however, as even two ads that load slowly could reduce traffic to your website. Sticky ads, audio ads, popups are all considered intrusive and, even in small amounts, could irritate users.
You should remember that each business is unique, and there is no one-size-fits-all model to optimizing your ad approach with your user experience.
Proper research and strategies backed by a good team can ensure that you can find a healthy balance for your business growth. Most ad publishers can be categorized under two categories:
Value Seekers (Long-Term):
These publishers do their best to seamlessly pass on value-based content needs to the visitor. For them, ads could serve as an obstructive medium for customer interaction, and that must be avoided at all costs.
Thinkers (Short-Term):
This group believes that great content will attract users regardless of how many advertisements are displayed.
Both these approaches carry potential risks and rewards. Too few ads could limit how much revenue your website makes, while too many could drive readers away. Balance is key.
3-Optimization of Ad-Placement:
For most publishers, advertisements are the only way to earn. However, you shouldn’t treat advertisements differently from the rest of your website’s content. In order to deliver better ROI for your business, the marketing team needs to put in effort and time to optimize the ads to be relevant to your content.
Ad placement optimization is also key to maintaining a positive user experience on your site. In order to be able to properly optimize the placement of your ads, however, you need to study and understand how the content on your website is presented and how users engage with it.
Scrutinize the way the users move through your site, where they click how long they stay on the website. Deriving valuable insights from user habits drive better engagement with users and allows you to personalize their ad experience. With consistent and continuous testing, you can ensure high user retention and maintain an optimized balance between UX and advertisements.
Conclusion
Even if you work hard to optimize your ads, and find the perfect balance to please users, you will always have at least 20 percent of your traffic impacted by Adblock users.
So what kind of measures can you take beyond just optimization in that case. Many solutions, like Admiral, have tried to recover Adblock traffic by forcing people to disable Adblock to access the content of their sites. However, these have been increasingly proven to drive readers away due to the poor user experience they create. Adcovery is the only solution that lets you maintain your entire audience, and monetize them effectively, without compromising the quality of the experience on your website.
