Ad blockers go mainstream: what it means for your media plan

The figures that got everyone's attention came from the PageFair and Adobe report in August: roughly 198 million monthly active blocker users worldwide, up 41 percent in a year, with about 45 million in the US and an estimated $21.8 billion in blocked ad revenue in 2015. Blocking rates vary sharply by audience. Technology and gaming sites commonly see 25 to 40 percent of desktop visitors blocking; general consumer and local business sites tend to see 5 to 15 percent.

Then on September 16, iOS 9 shipped with support for Safari content blockers. Within two days blockers held the top paid spots in the App Store. One of them, Peace, was pulled by its own developer after a day at number one because he felt uncomfortable with the blunt effect on publishers, which tells you how unsettled this is. The mobile share of blocking is still small compared with desktop, but iOS users are a valuable audience and the path to blocking is now a 99-cent download.

The IAB responded in October with its L.E.A.N. principles for lighter, encrypted, ad-choice-supported, non-invasive ads, and an acknowledgement that the industry's own practices caused this. That is the right diagnosis. It will take years to work through.

Blockers work from filter lists that match the domains and scripts ads load from. That makes the exposure very uneven across channels.

Two things that catch people out. First, blockers also commonly block analytics and tag scripts, so your Google Analytics and conversion pixels undercount blocker users and your retargeting lists never see them. Second, Acceptable Ads, the whitelist program run by the makers of the most popular blocker, lets some search and text ads through by default, which is part of why search exposure stays modest.

Industry averages are not your number. Before changing a media plan, find out what is happening on your site and in your campaigns.

1. Add a detection script to your site. A few lines of JavaScript that try to load a decoy file with an ad-like name and record whether it was blocked, pushed into an analytics custom dimension. Run it for 30 days.
2. Segment by device, browser and traffic source. Desktop Chrome and Firefox users arriving from technology and community sites will dominate. Mobile and email traffic will be low.
3. Compare impressions billed to impressions rendered wherever your display vendor offers viewability reporting. Blocked impressions typically never register at all, but viewability tells you what happens to the ones that do load.
4. Look at the gap between pixel-tracked conversions and back-end sales. If a growing share of orders has no attributed source, blockers are one of the explanations.
5. Rerun quarterly. The number will move.

Most businesses doing this find their exposure is somewhere between 8 and 20 percent of desktop sessions, concentrated in audiences they can name. That is enough to change a plan without panicking.

The response for an advertiser is a reweighting, not an exit from digital.

Move retargeting weight toward in-app placements. Facebook Custom Audiences and, since this fall, Instagram, reach the same website visitors inside apps that blockers cannot touch. Keep programmatic retargeting for the audiences where detection shows low blocking.

Protect search. It remains the least exposed performance channel and the one tied closest to intent. Blockers are a reason to reinforce it, not cut it.

Invest in things that do not look like ads. Email to your own list, content people seek out, sponsored placements inside a publisher's own format, and partnerships. These were good ideas before blockers; blockers make them necessary.

Buy video where it is native. Facebook video views and YouTube in-app reach are unaffected. Pre-roll bought across the open web is the most exposed video format.

Push vendors on measurement. Ask for blocked and non-rendered impressions to be excluded from billing, or at least reported. Some will, more will next year.

As a rough rule, if detection shows 15 percent or more of your desktop audience blocking, cut open-web display and retargeting budgets by about that share and move the money to in-app social, search and owned channels. Review after a quarter.

The underlying reason people install blockers is the experience: autoplay audio, pages that take 10 seconds to load because of 40 tracking scripts, interstitials that cover the content, retargeting that follows someone for a month after they bought the thing.

If you advertise, you can decide not to be part of that.

• Cap retargeting frequency at something a human would accept, and burn users out of the audience after they convert.
• Choose formats that load light and do not move unless the user asks. Avoid expandable units and autoplay with sound.
• Audit the tags on your own site. If your pages load a dozen third-party scripts, you are slowing your own customers down and giving them a reason to block everything.
• Say who you are. Native and sponsored content that is clearly labeled earns more trust than banners pretending to be editorial.

This is also where brand matters. A business with a distinctive, likeable identity gets its ads tolerated. A generic one does not.

Mobile blocking will grow, especially on iOS where the mechanism now ships with the operating system. Expect more publishers to experiment with walls, pleas and paid ad-free tiers, and expect a few to retreat from the worst formats. Expect Facebook and Google to keep most of their inventory in formats blockers cannot reach, which will strengthen their share of budgets further. And expect your own detection number to drift upward, which is why measuring it once is not enough.

We start with discovery: detection on the client's own site, a channel-by-channel exposure map and a check of what tracking scripts the site itself loads. From that we plan a reweighted media mix with explicit thresholds, so budget moves on evidence rather than on headlines. Build includes the detection and measurement setup, cleaner tagging on the site, and creative made for the formats that still reach people. Then we improve on a quarterly cycle, because this is a moving target. The work connects growth, brand, web and technology: the media plan, the ads themselves, the site that loads them and the data that proves what happened.

A representative engagement is the digital strategy and transformation work we did with a business whose acquisition plan leaned heavily on display retargeting. Detection on their own site showed exposure concentrated in exactly the desktop audience they valued most. We rebalanced the plan toward search and in-app social retargeting, simplified the site's tag load, and set up reporting that reconciled pixel-tracked conversions against actual orders, so the leadership team could see real performance rather than what the ad servers claimed. The outcome was a plan they could trust, which turned out to matter more than the specific budget shifts.