How to implement advertising monetization and not to kill UX of your product
Once, on a wonderful day…
Imagine that your product has just launched or just made another pivot. And it was decided to monetize it with the help of advertising.
Stakeholders impose to you the most profitable advertising formats and their vision of the optimal amount per user. And you are terrified when imagining how the product interface will transform after implementing ads monetization and how it will affect the user experience.
In this article, we will try to figure out how to implement advertising monetization, so that UX doesn’t suffer much from this.
Let’s dig deeper
First of all, let’s find out whether ads in the interface is a real problem for the user, or it is just a fiction.
Nielsen’s study says that 51% of respondents aged 18 to 24 said that they are ok with ads on mobile devices if the content is free. The older audience is less loyal to advertising on mobile devices
Millennials understand the necessity of ads in order for brands to inform the public of their products and services (79%) and many say that overall, ads don’t bother them (46%) — especially if the content they’re viewing is free (75%).The Nielsen Company
We can make the first conclusion, if your product has a younger audience, it will be easier for you to cope with negative feedback from your users if you give them free content instead of viewed ads.
Let’s dive in and try to find out exactly what annoys users in advertising.
In their report, NielsenNorman tells us that, in fact, all advertising formats in apps and websites are disliked by users, but on mobile users hated ads more.
Most of all, users dislike autoplay videos
Also in open-ended comments respondents wrote about the loading time of ads as a negative factor.
This suggests the next conclusion. Users most dislike ads that block and slow down interaction with the interface.
If you are new to Ad formats, you can read more about them here:
What opinion do the publishers have about Ad formats?
With advertising formats, there is another paradoxical situation, that the most hated by users formats are the most favorite and popular among publishers. Because they bring most of the profit.
Ok, we looked at the analytics, but what about real projects?
We figured out the level of hate for advertising among different age groups in general. We found out which formats are most disliked by users. Now we need to know how implementing or increasing the amount of advertising can affect the user experience.
One of the big and interesting examples in studying of the impact of advertising on user behavior is an experiment conducted by Jason Huang (Stanford University and Uber), David H. Reiley (Pandora Media Inc. and the University of California at Berkeley), and Nickolai M. Riabov (Brown University and Netflix) for streaming service Pandora.
Researchers studied 35 million users of the Pandora music streaming service from June 2014 to March 2016.
- 1. 18.3 million users were assigned to the control group, which used the usual Pandora service with the usual advertising amount: 3.6 advertisements per hour.
- 2. 1.8 million users were assigned to the group with a low level of advertising, which was provided 25% less advertising than the control group (2.7 advertising per hour).
- 3. 1.8 million users were assigned to the group with high advertising, which was provided with 38% more advertising than the control group (5.0 ads per hour).
The low-ad group listened 1.7% more hours per week than the control group. The group with a large number of advertisements listened 2.8% fewer hours per week than the control group.
It turns out that in the case when advertising increased by 38%, the time of using the service decreased by 2.8%. But here you need to understand that playing music will always take up most of the user’s time in the app unless you add more advertising than music to your application. 2.8% may be a significant figure for many products.
Also researchers measured user loyalty and determined that user loyalty is reduced by 0.9% for each additional advertisement shown per hour.
As a result of falling user loyalty, the number of active users and listening time per user has decreased.
What to do?
Choose formats of advertising and places for its placement carefully. Formats that will suit your type of product well and will not annoy the user and interrupt them from using your app.
Mix monetization models. For instance, you could mix between advertising and subscription models. With free access to content for viewing ads. This hybrid model is used by most streaming services, such as Spotify, Deezer, and Youtube. This approach gives the user a choice and can positively affect the user’s impression of the product.
Keep track of the frequency and amount of ads per user. Greater ad exposure can have a bad effect on UX. The precise amount of advertising that can dramatically affect the user experience cannot be estimated. Increase the amount of advertising in the product gradually, make measurements in analytics, conduct A/B tests and usability testing sessions.
Study user experience when interacting with advertisements and eliminate the biggest irritants. For example, replace one format with another. You can change the non-skippable video format to interstitial format. Or embed native banners that can inherit the styles of your product and thus will less annoy the user.
Explain to users why they see ads. It sounds very obvious, but most users don’t think that advertising allows developers to create and develop a product.
Study your target audience and its attitude towards advertising. As Nielsen’s study has shown, attitudes towards advertising may differ from one user to another. Conduct in-depth interviews with your users to find out their opinions and previous experience.
Engage in dialogue with your stakeholders. In this situation, you are between two fires. On the one hand, these are users and their negative experience of interaction with ads, on the other hand, they are stakeholders and the business, who probably want to get the maximum profit from monetization. It’s important to explain to stakeholders how negative user experience can affect the business as a whole. It will also be a big plus if you can present the data that will be based on your previous researches (user interview, analytics, A / B tests, etc.)
Conclusion
At the moment, there is no ideal advertising format that would suit all types of products, which would bring the maximum benefit to the business and at the same time not impair the user experience. But the harmful effects of the implementation of advertising on user experience can be minimized with the help of proper placement and the right combination of ads formats and by studying the effect of advertising intensity on user experience.