How users feel about online advertising

Archived article. First published in 2018, kept for the record — some details may be out of date.

How do users feel about online advertising?

According to eMarketer, the amount of online advertising has doubled over the past 5 years. By that source’s forecast, in 2018 brands, companies and individuals will spend around $210 billion on online advertising.

With neural networks entering marketing, the hit on the audience became precise. But why does someone react to any ad and actively buy products from links, while someone else patiently waits for the ad to end so they can read about the product in more detail? We gathered a few studies on online advertising and its prospects to figure out the reasons.

Ads conquer all ages

The AdReaction project split the active internet audience into 3 groups — generations X, Y and Z, where:

• Generation X (20% of the population) — people aged 35-50, a generation of loners ready for change, but the change must be gradual, because a key value of the generation is stability. Despite its former informality, this generation has the hardest time engaging with the internet, even though it appeared during their time and for them;
• Generation Y (24% of the population) — people aged 20-34, the engines of progress, the leading part of IT development — in the startup era it stands out;
• Generation Z (27% of the population) — people aged 5-19, the digital generation; for them IT isn’t the technology of the future, it’s their present.

For Generation X, online advertising is a source of reliable information; users in this age group respond to most types of ads, trust them, and about 40% of users click links out of curiosity.

Generation Y are the generators of change — they’re the ones who came up with making money on online ads, so they treat the phenomenon leniently, know how it works and understand that without ads their favorite resources won’t survive. For Y, the intrusive element is TV advertising.

The fewer emotions an ad takes, the calmer most users feel about it, regardless of age. The amount of online advertising is growing and the media space is searching for new formats to promote goods and services, because a number of solutions have already gotten quite tiresome to users.

The main types of online advertising from the most annoying to neutral:

• Pop-ups — 78% of people named this the most annoying type of ad — don’t do that anymore;
• Banners that expand to most of the screen — 68%;
• Unskippable videos — 46%;
• Text ads — 44%;
• Native ads — 32%;
• Tickers — 26%;
• Banners — 25%;
• Contextual ads — 20%.

Attitudes toward pop-ups don’t depend on the user’s age; violating boundaries strongly affects ad effectiveness. Finding the balance between selling and intrusive advertising is hard — pick interesting formats for your campaigns, try neutral color palettes without acid colors. Tasteful advertising hooks.

Danger! Your ad is blocked!

Geektimes found that users of generations Z and Y use ad blockers. Why?

• The ads are too intrusive — 51%;
• To speed up the browser — 22%;
• Annoyed by any ad, not just online — 16%;
• Friends recommended it, don’t know why themselves — 8%.

The first 2 reasons hint that your ad shouldn’t be heavyweight, so it doesn’t slow devices down. We already warned you about intrusiveness, well.)

A funny observation from the makers of Goodblocks — the sites users most often whitelist themselves force their users to watch a lot of ads:

• YouTube.com
• Facebook.com
• Forbes.com
• Reddit.com
• Pornhub.com
• Netflix.com

And does that stop anyone? Did YouTube and Facebook lose subscribers? — Nope!

Conclusion — make quality videos and landing pages that are easy on the eye and neutral in message. The young generations are annoyed by pressure.

About video and blood pressure

According to Cisco, within the next 2 years 80% of traffic will be video content. Research by Unruly showed how the three generations feel about video advertising:

• 49.5% of users note that repetitive ad clips lower their focus on the product;
• 84% of users watch video without sound;
• 74% of users lose trust if a clip is made poorly;
• An interesting concept is the main reason ad videos spread on social media;
• Generation Y users watch and share ad clips with their followers more often than others.

So, did your heart beat a little faster? The escape from stale formats has been found. Try different concepts for video about one product, shoot professionally — the brighter and more interesting your videos, the better their chances of ending up on your buyers’ personal pages. Or at least striking a nerve. And yes, don’t forget subtitles.

A sleight of hand, or native advertising in action

Native advertising is neither expensive nor intrusive; it’s the kind that most often becomes resonant and fits the “advertising that doesn’t annoy” format for most users. It seems to give the user more freedom, since they can decide for themselves when they want to read an article about great-grandpa’s camera on a classifieds site or take a “Which pizza are you?” quiz from the pizzeria around the corner. Wow!

But no. It’s an optical illusion. Native advertising has the super-power of “worming its way into trust.” It works especially well on Generation X — they’re used to taking everything at face value. An important indicator of good native is plausibility; try to pick honest facts about products and results, or at least make those facts sound believable — use your imagination and a super-convincing pre-roll is ready.

Generation Z reacts to native advertising if the native format is chosen well; an innovative approach is what can hook progressive youth. It can be a quiz or a game that draws users into the process so they perform the actions you need while naively believing it has nothing to do with advertising. Yes-yes, I’m definitely just a nice survey…

Priority formats:

• Well-made landing pages, games, quizzes, tasks, interactive videos, surveys — 55%;
• Promotion on social media — useful “around-the-topic” recommendation articles — 50%;
• Content featuring opinion leaders — 44%.

Now or never!

Besides the different types of ads, individual approaches to users and their age traits, buyer goodwill is influenced by their state at the moment of viewing. If a guy just scratched his bumper, he’s hardly going to be thrilled by the idea of enlarging his member RIGHT NOW.

AdReaction studied where and in what state representatives of different generations view the most online ads.

At home in a relaxed state, users most often study online ads, so the time after 6 p.m. is often profitable. At home, relaxed, everything lands well, it has to be said.

Picking the keys to clients is part of the analytics you need to do before launching ad campaigns. Correctly identifying your target audience’s traits is half the success.

Wishing everyone flawless ad campaigns and high profit!