How Digital Ads are Hurting Your Retail Business

There are retailers who believe they need to make customers aware of their deals the first second they visit their website. Retailers tend to do this with glorified full-width banner ads, pop-up ads and whatever a third-party vendor sells to them.

Consumers actually want a streamlined online and mobile shopping experience, which means less ads, according to a survey conducted by Instart Logic and Propeller Insights, who surveyed more than 1,000 adults in the U.S.

The survey discovered 42% of respondents were frustrated by pop-up ads that blocked them during their shopping experience on a retail website.

Over 51% of those surveyed said websites should decrease ads. How many ads were tolerable? Respondents (44%) said they could tolerate two ads per website during their web surfing experience.

Pop-up ads seemed to lead to the biggest frustration for 57 percent of those surveyed. The most annoying types of ads are the full-width ads.

Here are the top three suggestions from those surveyed:

• Less pop-up ads: 57%
• Less ads in general: 51.4%
• Remove ads that block content: 50.7%

With 48% of them stating they would bounce from a website or app if it crashed, retailers need to ensure ads aren’t hindering performance. While 36% said they would never return to a site or app again.

Conversions can be lost within the first second of a visit by overwhelming a visitor with the quantity or quality of a digital ad.