Display Advertising Related Concerns

Adblocking

Unfortunately, not all display ads are great, and sometimes they can become annoying to users. Also, sometimes the advertising servers that serve the ads on websites are slow and they may slow down the loading of an entire site. While you will see that high-quality publishers don’t suffer from these problems as much, bad experiences have driven consumers to search for a solution, and some users feel they found that solution in Ad blockers. A recent study from the IAB found that as many as 26% of users block ads on the desktop (and about 15% on mobile). And the numbers are growing. That is worrying advertisers and as a result, they have started to add new formats and types of ads to their campaigns, like for instance native ads that can’t be blocked because they look like content.

The IAB has been very vocal about this issue, and it is appealing to its members, the advertisers, to be mindful of the consumer experience and provide users with relevant targeted ads so the user is not as eager to block the ads.

Viewability

Another advertiser concern related to display ads has to do with how the impressions get counted and which ads the advertiser has to pay for.

With the way ad serving works, the ad server fills up all the empty spaces designated for ads as soon as a webpage loads. However, when a user looks at a website, they don’t see the whole page immediately, as a part of the page falls ‘below the fold’ - which means that part of the page does not fit on the screen and the user has to scroll down to see it. The problem occurs when the ad server shows the ads as delivered, even if the user did not see the ads. So, the ads were not ‘viewed’.

Advertisers are now demanding viewability metrics, which provide numbers on ‘viewed impressions’, and advertisers only want to pay for those impressions. Publishers are doing efforts to produce those metrics and to make advertisers only pay for the viewed ads, but advertisers still feel these numbers are not super reliable, and they often still feel they are overpaying.

These are real concerns, and it is important to be mindful of them. However, display advertising is still a powerful mechanism to get a message across, especially if you are using the sophisticated behavioral targeting options it offers.