Phantom Traffic: Immediate Solutions to Get Your Audience Back
Privacy, intrusive advertising, performance: user mistrust and demands have greatly increased over the last 5 years, as has the growing usage of ad blockers. Usage has crept up to 615 million users worldwide, with a 30% jump in 2017. The problem is that the activation of an ad blocker does not just prevent the display of an advertisement; it can also disable web analytics tools, even if the user hasn’t explicitly asked not to be tracked. Analytical data goes missing as a result — up to 30% of the actual traffic, in fact, which is doubly penalizing. For one, the measure can lead to poor management and faulty decisions. And secondly, one runs the risk of underestimating, and therefore devaluing, one’s audience.
Ad Blocking and Collateral Damages
Over 30% of French Internet users will use an ad blocker in 2019, up from 28.7 percent in 2018. These are a major issue for advertisers and publishers, leading to loss of revenue and traffic.
Since blockers prevent the display of banner ads, the volume of impressions decreases (and, in turn, advertising revenue for the publisher sites). The other problem for publishers is the loss of data as a result of blocker usage, which prevents the execution of analytical scripts. In the absence of accurate figures of visitors and visits, the quality of the data becomes highly questionable.
Stopgap Measures Do Exist!
People are greatly concerned by these data losses, as blocker usage is also increasing on mobile. In a recent article published on Digiday, the head of digital at Le Monde stated that he estimates the numbers to be lower than the reality. He points to the fact that ad blocking is above all a phantom traffic phenomenon. Le Monde’s strategy is to rely on their partner’s digital analytics to retrieve between 5% and 15% of the page views that slip past the radar due to ad blockers. This can be done by following best practices when implementing an analytics solution: renaming your Javascript files, choosing not to use a CDN (or content delivery network), and using neutral names rather than your brand name, among others. Some Web analytics solution providers even offer effective tools to work around the blockers. Since users are extremely sensitive when it comes to the use of their data (and with good reason), the idea is to allow for analytical measurements without disabling the ad blocking. This is based on a mechanism that switches to the advertiser’s domain name (rather than the web analytics provider’s domain) in order to collect the data. As blocking systems let through requests they deem legitimate (in other words, those that do not stem from ads or third-party tools), a large part of the traffic is thus retrieved. This type of domain first configuration has the advantage of preventing systematic and non-targeted blocking. It ensures that content publishers can retrieve analytical measurements while reassuring users that the data is limited to the domain of the visited site (rather than being transferred to a third-party domain). And lastly, the recovered traffic is certified by the CPMA.
Understanding and Educating Users
A complete and effective web analytics solution also allows you to analyze ad-blocker users in order to understand their behavior on a site. Where do they come from? Which pages are being blocked the most? What types of blockers are being used? With which browsers? It is important to measure the usage rate of advertising blockers (by creating a variable containing this information) and to observe its evolution over time depending on the campaigns implemented. You can then compare the effectiveness of different marketing channels and messages. This kind of continuous measurement, testing and optimization helps you identify blocker-user types, and to better tailor your message.
In addition to educating users about how advertising funds the creation of original, quality content, anti-adblocking campaigns can also be used to limit damages. Different warning levels can be put in place depending on the visitor. For example, a newcomer to the site (using a blocker) would have access to all of the content, with a warning message inviting them to disable the blocker, while visitors who return several times and have not disabled their ad blocker would be denied access to the content.
With the GDPR, the ad blocking phenomenon is now tied to a broader conversation surrounding ad quality and privacy data. Some advertisers even include the activation of blockers in their consent management platforms. In addition to user awareness, it is up to content editors to select reliable partners who are able to provide them with quality data and comply with European law.
