More than half of British adults now use ad blockers while browsing the internet, according to research from affilinet.
The study comprised responses from over 2000 British adults, with 20% of respondents admitting to using ad blocking ‘all the time’, and a further 34% saying they used it occasionally.
The report also asked respondents why they used ad blockers, with ‘I find ads online annoying’ the most commonly cited reason (62%) for its use.
A further 41% of respondents said ads are intrusive and disruptive, while a third agreed the ads they’re served are irrelevant.
Lack of personalisation hindering advertising quality
This last statistic acts as a reminder to marketers to embrace delivering even higher levels of personalisation to their advertising efforts.
In fact, separate research from The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) from earlier this year revealed 76% of marketers believe ad blocking will encourage greater creativity – however, a further 38% did admit the rise of ad blocking could lead to a decline in online marketing.
Peter Rowe, UK MD of affilinet, commented: “It seems that while more than half of the respondents we questioned are users of online ad-blockers in some way, one of the biggest issues associated with wanting to remove ads is that the targeting of ads is not quite hitting the mark; with more than half confessing the ads they used to see were irrelevant.
“One must, therefore, assume that with better targeting of online ads, Brits would be more likely to re-embrace being communicated with online via brand messaging.”
