Marketers reaction to AdBlock being sold

AdBlock got sold last week. Who the buyer is, what the buyer’s intentions are and how this will affect advertising remains unclear.

What is clear although, is that the demand for AdBlock are increasing. The almost 100 million users has downloaded the plugin because of their tiredness of ads. Some say that advertisers only have themselves to the blame for this new ad-avoiding trend, but how should we marketers using the platforms now act?

First of all, users blocking ads doesn’t mean online marketing being dead. Far from. It doesn’t either mean display advertising is being dead. Partly as Google & Amazon and other big companies are on the AdBlock whitelist. Partly because there are other ways of display advertising.

People still react to display advertising

Even except for Google’s Display network (which is on the whitelist) you see display advertising everywhere. It is in your LinkedIn, Facebook and other Social media feeds, it is in your e-mails and on all YouTube videos.

Linkedin Feed with boosted content

Display advertising on the whitelist

The current whitelist contains more than 300 companies (an amount that might change after this transaction). One of those companies are Google with their Display network.

As of roughly 100 million users have AdBlock installed, it will be to assume that not all Internet users will be reachable through display advertising. These could instead be reached through channels as Facebook & LinkedIn feed ads and YouTube commercials. The strategy is to link your ads to valuable content and convert your customers in an educating and engaging way.

Understand your marketing ROI

When users block ads, obviously ads won’t be shown to them. For a small business owner, that means he won’t have to pay for those leads. Rather, he could focus on the users that don’t block ads. As these users will be used to seeing ads all the time there are three type of user:

  1. The user that hates all type of ads, being daily spammed by banners
  2. Ready-to-buy customer who love buying things online & appreciate seeing re-targeted ads
  3. Un-technical user, occasionally doing online purchases.

With the use of segmentation, you can use interests and demographics to segment these groups and target them accordingly. Most industries would only want to target the customer with his credit card ready to buy, and can target him with previous purchase behaviors and effective re-targeting. The other groups can be targeted with unique ad-formats.

Convert in an educating and engaging way

Banners has 0.1% click-through-rate and with AdBlocks popularity it is clear that user behavior has changed. To convince a customer to buy your product, you need to first educate the person in the subject, make him aware of the potential problem, honestly explain how your sector can solve the problem and close with why your product beats the competition. This is targeted content marketing in a nutshell.