Consumers turn to the internet to quickly and conveniently find the information and entertainment they want. To ensure they’re not distracted and annoyed by unwanted interruptions, many choose to enable ad blockers to improve their browsing experience. This means marketing agencies have to find creative ways to capture attention online.
The industry experts of Forbes Agency Council understand the limitations ad blockers bring to online marketing. They have tried-and-true techniques for developing marketing and information campaigns that reach target audiences on the Web without annoying or frustrating them. Maintain your ad revenue and build meaningful engagement with their advice.
Forbes Agency Council members share strategies to help marketers reduce the impact of ad blockers.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Try To Find New And Optimal Locations For Your Ads
Ad blockers exist, but a world without ads is hard to imagine. Anywhere people are gathered, advertisers will be there as well. Companies should be focused on utilizing all the advancements in advertising as well as on trying to find the next gathering place or the ideal location for showing ads efficiently. – Brian Meert, AdvertiseMint
2. Aim For Relevance Rather Than Reach
Ad blockers negatively affect the reach of a campaign. So, ad agencies should make sure they reach the right audiences. Start focusing on relevance rather than reach. – Jordi Marca, Gotoclient
3. Find Experts Who Can Work Around Ad Blockers
The best way to deal with the impact of ad blockers? Find a partner or expert with lots of experience in working around them. Even the savviest of agency strategists can stumble when it comes to keeping up with the ins and outs of ensuring your ads are visible to your target audience. Work with a specialist and lean on their expertise to help your campaigns reach their goals. – Christopher Tompkins, The Go! Agency
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4. Diversify Your Advertising Methods
Ad blockers can limit the number of eyes that see your ads and prevent agencies from fully reaching their target audience. To overcome this, diversify your advertising methods, find creative ways to seamlessly integrate ads into the content itself or, if all else fails, hire a specialist to work around the ad blockers. – Lion Shirdan, UPRISE Management
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5. Invest In Earned Media
If you’re doing enough volume that ad blockers eat away a significant portion of your results, then you have the resources to invest in earned media, which will jump over every technical hurdle there ever was or will be. Even for smaller projects, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Without the third-party credibility of PR, your messages will eventually get too weak to convert. – Christine Wetzler, Pietryla PR
6. Create Original Content And Engage Influencers
Ads get blocked because they can disrupt the journey. Every ad can be an obstacle if someone wants an answer to a question or desires to watch a specific video. Brands need to provide a solution to their customer’s problems by creating original content that users will seek out, engaging with influencers they follow and being there when consumers seek online reviews and tutorials. – Stefan Pollack, The Pollack Group
7. Focus On Native Advertising
Ad blockers can affect agencies’ work; there can be a significant impact on the performance of mobile PPC campaigns since there is a big chance your target audience won’t see the ads. A way to deal with this is to focus on native advertising since it looks, reads and appears like “true” content. – Jonas Muthoni, Deviate Agency
8. Leverage Nondisruptive Advertising Methods
Ad blocking has ushered in a new era of marketing, and the future for brands is being part of the content, not disrupting it. Marketers must leverage nondisruptive methods, including brand integrations across entertainment outlets from broadcasting to livestreaming. To identify the most impactful opportunities to avoid ad blocking, utilize AI to help sort through the crowded space. – Ricky Ray Butler, BEN
9. Design Relevant And Clever Ads
Ad blockers exist in part because ads can be very annoying and disruptive, particularly on mobile content. Our point of view is that ads need to be relevant, targeted to the right audience, and well-designed and clever—like an interesting billboard—to pique interest. If you create such ads, your results will be better and you will annoy people less. Don’t overdo the recency and frequency on retargeting. Be interesting. – Megan Devine, d.trio marketing group
10. Create Holistic Campaigns
As marketers and good people, we should respect ad blockers. With that being said, it’s important to have a holistic brand marketing campaign that doesn’t rely on only one type of media channel (paid). Content, social media and email are also channels that aren’t “blocked,” per se. – Stefan Katanic, Veza Digital
11. Utilize Influencer Marketing
Accept the clear message that consumers are giving you: They don’t want to see disruptive advertising. Brands no longer talk to consumers. Instead, consumers talk to other consumers about brands. Influencer marketing penetrates through ad blockers because social media is a closed ecosystem. It yields better results because it feels like a recommendation from a trusted friend. – Christoph Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising
12. Choose Your Ad Space Wisely
If anything, ad blockers should push agencies to innovate better methods of messaging. Ad blockers exist because people don’t want to see disruptive ads. Ad blindness might as well be a built-in human ad blocker, anyway. The best solution is to choose ad space more wisely and find a space where it’s unlikely to be blocked. Find better channels for information so you don’t need to rely heavily on banner ads or blocked content. – Dmitrii Kustov, Regex SEO
13. Leverage Precision Targeting
I believe that the adoption of ad blockers is a signal that we, as advertisers, need to up our game. If we delivered more relevant, timely and interesting ad content to Web browsers, they would not feel the need to block ads. We need to deliver more engaging ad content through precision targeting of our ideal audience with less reach- and frequency-focused buying. – Korena Keys, KeyMedia Solutions
14. Ramp Up Your Offline Efforts
If one form of media poses challenges, look for other, more welcoming forms of paid media. Offline, outdoor and podcast media are all great options to explore for reaching your audience and generating ROI. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
