I know you all want to hear another rant on ad blocking about as much as you’d like to hear an endless loop of Tiny Tim singing Tiptoe Thru The Tulips. I’ll keep it brief, therefore. A company called Soasta did some research with the Harris folks about what website users were looking for as they surf around. Not surprisingly, they found the following (as reported by eMarketer):
When it comes to website performance, internet users say personalized content is less important than a website’s ease of navigation and speed, according to a September 2015 survey. More than three-quarters of US internet users said that a leading attribute of website performance was that it was easy to navigate. Another top attribute was speed; 73% of respondents indicated so.
Here is a truism (at least one I’ve found) about digital interactions: people hate impediments. It doesn’t matter if it’s a landing page from an ad that doesn’t go directly to the reason someone clicked on the ad or if it’s just a plain old web page. People are pressed for time. Any impediment we put in their way has a high likelihood of derailing the interaction. Web pages that are slow to load because of external calls get closed. For you non-technical people, that means when the page calls out for an ad (especially if it needs to fill the ad via a programmatic auction), or some behavioral tracker, or anything else like analytics. Popups are an impediment as well – it’s something in between the user and what they are trying to do. The research bears this out. Personalization, on the other hand, can help speed up the interaction since it’s based on the user’s likes and preferences.
Ad blockers generally speed up page loads. That is one of the main reasons people use them besides avoiding tracking. If we help people hurry up, maybe they will, in return, be more responsive to the marketing information we present instead of doing all they can to avoid it.
Make sense? What are your thoughts?
Consult Keith 