Introduction
According to Matt Davies Stockton, many website owners are not aware of how online clutter is killing their digital marketing campaigns and ruining their brand image. Online clutter involves anything that ruins the user experience when they visit your website. Thus, it includes massive banner ads that cover the top portion of the webpage, sidebar ads, sticky ads that break the flow of content, footer ads, pop-ups, and more.
The Discussion
Here is how online clutter or ads are killing digital marketing:
- It makes the website slow – Most website owners feature ads on their websites to earn money. Now, many people assume they can earn more money by featuring more ads on their websites. However, this practice completely ruins their SEO efforts since it makes their website extremely resource-heavy and slow.
Websites that feature lots of ads get bogged down in resource calls, excessive scripting, and uncompressed image downloads which slows down the page loading speed. Google doesn’t like slow-loading websites and neither do website visitors. Thus, ads-heavy websites get an SEO penalty and there is no way to fix them without turning off excess ads.
- It ruins the user experience – When you browse the internet, you expect to consume your favorite sources of media, learn something interesting, learn how to solve a problem, upload or download media, and more. In fact, every online visitor clicks on a webpage page with a certain expectation in their mind.
However, if they are bombarded with sidebar ads, header ads, footer ads, and sticky ads that cover half the content, it becomes a source of extreme annoyance. Pop-ups and auto-playing audio and video ads are even worse. The problem is worse when browsing websites using your smartphone since it becomes harder to kill the ads.
As a result, this ruins the user experience, and the users leave the website. Your SEO efforts will be in vain if your website has a high bounce rate since it indicates that your website provides no value to its target audience.
- It distracts the user – One of the major goals of a digital marketing campaign is to attract more traffic to your website so that you can turn potential leads into paying customers. Unfortunately, bad ads only serve to distract the users on your website and can even turn them away from your website.
Good ads can snatch away the traffic from your website and divert it to different sites. In the end, your SEO efforts will suffer in both cases.
- It builds a bad brand image – Nobody likes to view ads. In fact, almost 30 percent of online global audiences use ad blockers to block online ads. This should give you a hint of why featuring ads on your website can lower the brand image of your website and destroy SEO efforts.
Conclusion
Matt Davies Stockton suggests you limit the number of ads on your website in order to improve the user experience and build a better brand image. Disable auto-play audio and video ads since they are extremely distracting and ensure none of the ads featured on your website block the website content.