PPC - Pay Per Click Management

It’s the arch enemy of PPC. Ad blockers are add ons to web browsers such as Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firebox which prevents adverts from showing. The main reason for ad blockers becoming popular is due to the websites that display irrelevant and rather large pop-up adverts. I can agree with ad blocker users that some of these adverts do get annoying especially when they claim you are the 9,999,999,999th visitor and will get a prize for this. The problem is that ad blockers are potentially hurting the earnings of both advertisers and publishers in PPC.

The problem is that ad blockers have the potential to ruin PPC. They take seconds to install and will prevent browsers from displaying your adverts. This far to easy for my liking. In theory, everyone on the internet could use ad blockers and in that scenario, PPC will be banished.

Ad blockers have been innovated over recent years to how they prevent adverts from showing. Some ad blockers find the URLs which have the ad servers on them and stop the browser from downloading them altogether while others simply locate the adverts (as they are <scripts> so can be located) on a webpage and blank them out, leaving an empty space behind. This lead me to an experiment involving Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a <script> too. So, ad blockers should stop the script from download with Google Analytics? In the early days of Ask Will Online, I used two programs to record my stats: Google Analytics and Blogger. What I found was that Blogger recorded 11,103 views for that month while Google Analytics only recorded 7,604. If Google Analytics recorded less pageviews due to ad blockers preventing the <script> from loading, that is a 32% decrease in ad impressions!

For advertisers, the problem with ad blockers is not as serious since there are potentially thousands of websites you can target your adverts to. However, with publishers, it is a different matter. I have found, from just my website, that ad blockers are preventing my website from gaining around 30% more ad impressions, 30% more clicks and 30% more revenue.

I think Ad blockers, like Google has done with PPC, need to innovate so that only the ‘spammy’ adverts are blocked from web browsers. PPC programs are spending millions or trying to make advert results as contextual and targeted to the web user as possible. Adverts are not meant to put individuals at a disadvantage online or meant to annoy them either. The whole point of adverts is to introduce the web user to something they might be interested in: that might benefit them. For this reason, try not to use Ad blockers. You will find that you will naturally click on adverts anyway because they are designed to interest you. Without adverts, nothing would be sold and since PPC is a big part of online advertising, there should be no program that is out there that could potentially ruin it. If you are going to use ad blockers, make sure you let Google adverts (AdChoices) continually show.