What E-commerce Marketers Need to Know About Ad Blockers and How to Mitigate Them

Ad blockers – sometimes known as content blockers – are simple browser extensions that prevent ads from being shown on websites. The first ad blocking extension was introduced to the market in 2002. Today, 42.7% of internet users worldwide report using an ad blocker. And the technology has expanded beyond the desktop. Content blocking software for mobile devices and tablets is now widely available.

The most commonly cited reason for ad blocking is that websites are more manageable without banners, but consumers also want to avoid irrelevant or offensive messages as well as prevent tracking of their online behavior.

The same studies show consumers are willing to disable ad blockers in return for the ability to view relevant content. This creates a window of opportunity for marketers, who can mitigate ad blocking by offering a personalized user experience and increasing the chances their content will reach their target audiences.

Ad blockers use filter lists (blacklists of URLs and URL fragments to be blocked). These lists are curated by online communities, so there’s no single authority and no easy way to have URLs removed from a list once being placed on it. Over time, in addition to the URLs of ad-serving companies, the URLs of experimentation and personalization platforms (i.e. SiteSpect) also wound up on these lists.

Take a look for yourself: https://easylist.to/easylist/easyprivacy.txt.

As a Marketer who relies on a platform like SiteSpect, you may be doing a lot of work to set up experiments and personalize experiences. These ad blockers may be confusing your variations and personalized content for advertising and blocking it for your users. The SiteSpect development team got busy creating an ad block mitigation feature. An ad block mitigation tool detects ad blockers and automatically seeks alternative methods to deliver personalized content. The SiteSpect Ad Blocker Mitigation feature:

• Enables every SiteSpect customer to choose a unique naming standard for the URLs and resources that deliver user experiences from SiteSpect. Because this naming standard is unique to each customer, the likelihood the URLs will ever get added to an ad blocker blacklist is very low.
• Enables customers to proactively change the naming standard on a regular basis.
• The combination of unique URL naming standards per customer and the ability to periodically change them means your variations and personalizations will side-step ad blockers and be delivered to your users as intended.

Delivering a better user experience on your site with personalized variable content will help accelerate revenue for your company.

To learn more about SiteSpect, visit our website.