When to start to block the ad blockers?

I'm with you I don't want to annoy my users with overlays and pop-ups.

But blocking adverts that are not relevant to you is a hard job, your happy with AdWords because they show related ads but do they all the time? For example your a supporter of team X and your reading a match report about team Y vs. team X. Google will show adverts for both teams from say the BBC or Ebay. 50% relevant which is better I suppose.

But as a content owner why would I want to advertise the BBC? When your watching the football on ITV you don't get an advert to watch it on the BBC, its relevant but it woudn;t happen.

You do get adverts for Cars, football boots, beer. Not really relevant to the content you have been watching.

Why should publishers online only take adverts that are relevant to the content like adwords provide should they not be relevant to the general user base?

My user profiling tells me that my users are mostly males with 30k+ they are interested in cars, dating, shopping online, betting. Just the type of advert I show.

Users are not blocking adverts because they are not relevant to them they are blocking adverts because they annoy them, for this I lay the blame at the door of the agencies. OK I shouldn't take the annoying adverts...I do try and kep them to a minimum its an addiction you know ;-).....

You are right though I should not be over reliant on advertising revenue but after many ideas and many hours its the only revenue stream for my type of site.

Unless you have a better suggestion I am stuck with adverts for now.

John

>This is true - but its also true that TV ads nowadays are
>more
>of a branding exercise rather than sales one - people
>switch off but might remember some funny ad that related
>to
>company X.

Why can this not be true for online? See my other post which covers this topic :-)

>
>These categories are too general - I like _SPECIFIC_ cars,
>not
>all cars - ie I am not big fanatic of ANYTHING related to
>cars, but
>specific models will ring bell in my head very nicely.

But unless a use gives me in depth profile information and I am able to tie that into an adserver that is impossible to so. And I know that 90% of my users won't bother.

>I agree - problem of relevancy is instrumental to agency's
>behaviour -
>their previous irrelevant ads stopped getting clicks, so
>they go for
>annoying factor instead of trying to fix the relevancy
>issue, which is
>of course is not easy to do for them!

Why should clicks be the mesurement for a sucessful campain? You don't expect someone watching tv to stop what they are doing and go and buy a product...its branding and product awareness that advertising is about.

>>Unless you have a better suggestion I am stuck with
>>adverts for now.
>
>Well I think your business is doomed and you are better
>off selling
>me 99% stake for £10, and I will show you true
>potential of it - you
>will still keep 1% to benefit from my wisdom ;-)

Thanks but no thanks ;-). My site costs about £200 a month to run so I can waid it out if the market does change and then follow in that direction.

Cheers
John

I would love to get figures from advertisers on ROI but I never do. All I know is if they rebook it must be working.

For example last year a betting company advertised with us for 12 months in a row. They had some of the worsth click through rates we'd ever had because they we're doing 50-100,000 page imps a day, but they would come back month after month. I am guessing we must have given them a good ROI.

I also think a banner should and could be very effective in being memorable I have never seen any one try it.

I would be more than willing to test such things out on my site but all I get is the bog standard boring ani-gifs and flash.

A game built into a banner is a simple but effective branding exersise, no need for the user to leave the site (because why would he, hes just arived!) have a quick shot and get on with his business. But I can not remember the last time I saw one of those. Is this becasue they are too expensive to make? If so someone is charging too much and shoting themselves in the foot...or maybe they don't work I dunno.

Any way back on topic...I'd still like to remove users from my network who are blocking adverts....;-)

John

I know that this betting company looked at sign-ups and betting turn over before deciding on what sites to rebook with.

We're now with a new agency who have yet to get a deal with them that we are happy with, the agency had a standing CPC deal when we joined which I am not interested in. We are in negotiations :-)

The last bit was said in jest of course but you have got me thinking about other means of generating revenue from users.

We use intelli text which is a simmilar thing to google adsense but it reads content for keywords and turns them into links. Have yet to get a revenue report to see how sucess full it has been (its due in today so I might nag them) but I know we we're geting double the number of clicks we get on graphical adverts on a third less pages.

John