.
If you do research on advertising online or on the Internet, the amount of content available will be many times greater than what you will be able to consume, even if you dedicate several hours or even days. Every site that deals with the subject has one – or several – articles talking about the thousand and one wonders and advantages of it.
The first consequence is causing a problem that seems difficult to see for those involved, especially the content sites, but not only them – the excess of online advertising.
How much online advertising does your site display? How to know when what the limit? What are the consequences of this? These are some of the questions you’ll be able to answer by the end of our chat today.
The state of advertising on content sites
Cell phone in hand, looking for news of your interest to pass the time while you’re on the bus, in the subway, or at any other time, it doesn’t matter, you tap on a title of content from your favorite team, on a new and trendy reinforcement .
When starting to load the page, you already slide down looking for the first paragraph of the text. Instead, first an advertisement between the title and the image that illustrates the story. Soon another appears above the title and pushes everything further down.
It scrolls down a bit more, but then a blank space opens on the screen and another one begins to load and despite continuing to slide, a fourth one appears, until finally, after scrolling down, down and down, the first two lines of the paragraph are displayed.
But when you start reading the third line, a fifth goes up from below and covers almost the entire content.
You try to find how to close it and when you click on the tiny “X” that should get rid of it, you “accidentally” go to the website of the ad. That “X” is deliberately small to mislead you.
Touching to go back repeats the entire process above and beyond, a sixth one appears and right below a “learn more” button and which you think is the way to continue reading. Big mistake. Yet another page linked to advertising and yet another “trick” to deceive you.
In an exercise in patience, after all your curiosity about who is coming to reinforce your team’s attack is greater than your irritation and you come back once more.
But when you return, when you place your finger on the screen for another scroll, another one appears – we’ve lost count of how many there were – like magic!
Now more attentive to the “deceiving” buttons and the ads that appear like popcorn bursting in a pan, you finally manage to read another portion of the text. The information and name of who is coming is not there yet, so you have to keep swiping and seeing new blank areas appear to accommodate other advertisers.
After insisting and getting a little irritated, he read the news and discovered that information that could have consumed 30 seconds or at most, one minute, took him much longer, made him angry, made him see much more advertising content than that what interested him and will still cause accidental and non-voluntary touches, make the same advertisements appear 4597 more times in other contents that he decides to consume.
After all, the recorded cookies will indicate that you were “interested” in the products / services, which you didn’t want to, but clicked! And being third-party cookies, your privacy has already been compromised and the LGPD to some extent ignored.
It is a fictional situation, but it is based on the reality of all of us today when we navigate around. Even many football news sites are perfect examples of this online advertising exaggeration that has dominated the Web.
Why is there too much advertising online?
With some reason, the amount of content about the benefits and advantages of online advertising is immense! However, no one – or very few people – talk about the disadvantages of abuse or how to do it right.
It is undeniable that when conducted professionally, there are benefits, but like everything else in life, common sense and limits are needed.
Whether you are paying to have your brand displayed on the Internet, or who is paid for displaying this advertising on your website, financial motivation is the main reason.
They are mostly supporters of “the more, the better”.
Our description of the hypothetical scenario is far from being an exception or just an example. On the contrary, it has been the new “normal” and reinforced the mistaken idea that the amount is directly proportional to the benefit.
When a smaller site administrator who still doesn’t have a good audience accesses and browses some big and well-known ones, he consciously or not, assumes that that flood of ads popping on the screen must be good and does not bring negative consequences and simply copies the practice, but on your own website.
The difference is that a large, popular site with tens of thousands of daily hits, even if it suffers negative consequences, also gets some benefits due to volume. They are the exception rather than the rule.
But that’s not all that has driven the excess of advertising on websites:
- Google – Google tools such as AdSense and Ads have made advertising insertion accessible to “laymen” at both ends of the chain, virtually eliminating agencies, which among other things also provide advice on how effective placement should be done ;
- Monetization vs advertising – on the one hand, the frantic search for monetization and especially the sites that only survive thanks to it, and on the other hand, the advertiser’s anxiety for visibility. In the end, neither one nor the other, because the belief that providing more advertising space increases revenue, encourages excess and decreases efficiency;
- CMSs – like Google’s tools, CMSs made it possible for anyone to create and maintain a website, without advice from professionals specialized in several of the concepts that a website must meet and neglecting issues of design and layout, user experience, navigation, colors, fonts, icons, etc. Everything is restricted to the personal taste of those who create;
- Metrics – as a result of the aspects above and which made it possible for anyone to “manage” a website, it is not uncommon that there are no metrics to indicate its direction and everything that is done on it, or that people do not know how to interpret them properly.
8 consequences of too much advertising
Some consequences – or problems, if you prefer – of the scenario we initially described are very visible and obvious.
A site like the one described is, to say the least, visually ugly, tiring and boring! That would already be three good enough reasons to rethink the “strategy” of excessive advertising.
It is for no other reason that ad-blocking extensions are the most successful!
But there are other implications that need to be kept in mind whenever you think about opening up more space for online advertising on your site.
1. Ranking on Google
It is estimated that there are around 200 ranking factors used by Google to determine a page’s placement in the results for each search performed.
Among the many factors, at least two that are directly affected by over-advertising, leading to the effects we’ve described on an over-advertised site, are on-page experience and PageSpeed Insights.
There is no doubt that the experience will be bad and the loading speed too, especially if the user does not have a good connection, such as 5G, or even a “vitaminized” 4G.
2. Website performance
In addition to the influence of loading speed, the overall performance of the site will be seriously compromised and dependent on the number of ads loaded, as well as the weight of each one.
It is necessary to bear in mind that although many are distributed by CDNs, aiming at better performance and availability, the number of requests to external servers is a process that also overloads the visitor’s browser.
Even someone on a notebook or desktop and with good speed on Wi-Fi 6 will notice that the performance of such a site is considerably worse than those who know how to dose it.
3. UX Design
UX Design refers to the experience as a whole that the visitor has as a result of what he sees. In this context, layout and design have more than an aesthetic function and influence how he consumes content, ease of navigation, location of resources and even how he takes advantage of them.
So, needless to say, with a site like the one described, all these aspects will be ruined, particularly in its mobile version.
The excess has been so exaggerated in some cases that even in the desktop version, what you see when you access it, makes you want to leave the site immediately.
4. Aesthetics and image
The aesthetic question, the visual hierarchy and all aspects of design, become irrelevant, no matter how much time and resources have been invested in it.
In a site dominated by advertising, issues such as diagramming, layout, colors, fonts, images, logos and everything that should serve to compose something visually pleasing and create a visual identity, lose function.
5. Visitation
Visitation may be affected, even using mechanisms to generate traffic.
In extreme cases, some sites are marked by visual pollution, poor performance and the negative experience they provide, literally scaring away visitors, who after a few visits will remember and avoid clicking on links that lead to them.
6. Conversion
The conversion rate where applicable and the actual conversion of the ads will be compromised.
During the instants that the visitor remains on the page, all he is focused on is trying to consume the content that brought him. As soon as he succeeds – sometimes he doesn’t – his immediate reaction is to hit the back button.
Ads – even the eventually interesting ones – become barriers that need to be avoided at all costs and your only task becomes trying to identify what is not the content he was looking for.
7. Engagement
The chances that the content will be shared, receive a comment or any other form of engagement also decrease dramatically.
Expecting someone to share with a friend, access social media or any other interaction is almost like expecting a miracle.
8. Brand
Even sites that do not have an institutional role for a brand must be concerned with creating a brand concept. By the way, this is one of the premises of Marketing, be it traditional or digital.
Think of sites that you know, like and visit regularly that are not owned by companies but are essentially the business of the company, such as content portals, for example. The biggest and best do the job of linking you to their brand.
But when a site exceeds the bounds of reason in terms of advertising, it goes against the grain.
In addition to compromising this objective, due to the set of negative consequences that we have already listed, when he gets associations in the visitor’s mind, they are negative and, therefore, produce a bad image of the brand.
Conclusion
Excessive online advertising on a website produces a series of negative consequences, sometimes greater than the advantages and can even ruin it.
.
