Ad blockers have become very popular, especially as more people get annoyed with intrusive or obnoxious online ads and try to find ways to block them. For businesses that rely on ads to get traction, get recognition or sell products, ad blockers can have a significant impact on their PPC campaigns as well as the businesses themselves.

Ad Blockers: An Overview

If you have not heard about them, ad blockers are browser extensions or software used to block ads on browsers. There are dozens of ad blockers to choose from, with each browser, platform and operating system having various ad blocker solutions available.

Loss of Revenue

Perhaps the biggest and most obvious way ad blockers have affected PPC is the loss of revenue for those who run these ads. Ad blockers prevent people from seeing the ads. This is especially true for businesses that rely on search engine ads to promote their products and services. It does not matter how many ad formats the business is using or how good their ads are; if a user has an ad blocker installed, they will never see these ads.

This means that if a business is depending on clicks to land sales, there will be lowered sales due to fewer people visiting the target website. This can lead to a loss of revenue where the business is spending money on its PPC campaigns but is not making any money off it.

Ad Blockers Have Made Retargeting Harder

Retargeting is a very important part of PPC advertising. Retargeting is where tracking pixels or other types of tags are “installed” on a user’s browser or device so that a marketer can “follow” them around the internet and show them highly targeted ads through their PPC campaigns. The problem is that ad blockers prevent the addition of these pixels and tags which has made it harder for marketers to target visitors with highly relevant ads.

The result is people seeing ads they might not be interested in because some of the websites they visit might be set up to show ads even when these ads are not necessarily relevant. This results in fewer people clicking on the ads and thus lower impressions, conversions and returns on PPC investments.

Native Sites are Not Affected

While third-party sites are usually blocked almost everywhere when users use an ad blocker, that does not happen for native PPC ads on some social media platforms. On Twitter, for example, proposed posts (which are essentially PPC ads) are not blocked. This is because they are integrated so well that they seem like they are a native part of the platform.

The result is similar companies competing for the same eyeballs because they are sure their ads will be seen on these platforms. This can decrease visibility, increase user ad fatigue and increase the cost of running a campaign on such platforms.

While some people might see ad blockers as necessary, it is important to try to understand how they affect businesses, marketers and website owners. Businesses that rely on PPC campaigns are most affected because users end up not seeing their ads any more.