Search ads: powerful and never annoying

August 9, 2016: Hubspot recently published a joint study with ad blocking developer Adblock Plus that validates the proposition that search ads work so well because they don’t annoy users who view or click on them. It also explains why Google will largely remain immune from the damaging economic effects of ad blocking, which many have cited as a threat both to publishers and the mature digital advertising ecosystem we have today.

Hubspot’s study was based on a survey of 1,055 web users in the U.S., Germany, France, and the U.K. Let’s go right to the data:

As you can see, Google’s humble text ads rated lowest of any digital ad format on the user annoyance scale.

Hubspot’s data isn’t particularly surprising. Online pop-ups ads – disliked by 73 percent of respondents — have long been the most-hated digital ad format for more than a decade (remember the X10 campaign that succeeded in annoying almost a third of web users through the use of intrusive pop-up technology?). Google forbids advertisers from using this ad format in campaigns booked on its ad networks. Other display ad formats that got low marks from respondents were pre-roll video ads that forced them to wait to consume video content (57 percent) and Facebook ads (40 percent).

Text ads – the kind sold by Google on its search and 3^rd party network of Adsense publishers – did surprisingly well, with only 25 percent of users disliking them, nearly on par with relatively non-intrusive ad formats such as physical billboards (21 percent) and magazine/print ads (18 percent).

Why do people accept search ads?

Search ads are the original form of “native advertising” and the natural role they play in the information discovery process has been both misunderstood and underestimated in the traditional world of advertising. As Didit’s CEO Kevin Lee has noted, search ads are in many cases more relevant to a user’s query – especially if such a query has commercial intent – than the organic listings that appear on the same SERP. Consequently, search-based text ads are welcomed –- or at least tolerated without active resistance –- by users who otherwise find being exposed to advertising – especially forms of advertising that force them to wait or actually interfere with their discovery journey – objectionable enough to consider the ad blocking solution.

Search ads aren’t perfect, of course. There are limits to what search ads can do, of course. Because they are only invoked when a user has recognized an inner need to fulfill, thus executing a query, they are less than effective as a demand-building mechanism. Other forms of advertising – online and off – must fulfill this traditional role.

Search ads are also relatively expensive: they are of course sold at auction where click prices can vary wildly, especially when deep-pocketed competitors enter the market and alter the supply/demand balance, and it’s very easy to lose money unless the destination URLs they point to are optimized for conversions. And while there’s some evidence that search ads do create branding lift, they are mainly used for direct-response purposes, a fact that’s made it easy for them to be written off as “promotional” devices that don’t really deserve to be called “advertising” at all.

But there’s no question that those humble, text-based search ads – when used in a coordinated way with demand-building campaigns that are going on, via television, radio, billboards, PR, direct mail, and online – play a key role in leveraging one’s investments in other media and have proven highly profitable to marketers able to use them to intelligently harvest demand.

There’s also little doubt that while ad blocking poses a serious threat to the monetization models of publishers and ad networks, search-based ads are the ad format least likely to be affected by growing ad blocking rates. Why? Because when people go looking for something on Google, they generally want to see everything – paid listings – organic listings: the whole enchilada. And while much of what they see is “sponsored content,”  that’s OK with them, for the same reason that many people enjoy window shopping or surfing eBay with no immediate intention to buy anything.

Search ads are non-intrusive. Relevant. Low-bandwidth. Targeted to what you’re looking for (or, at least, what Google thinks you’re looking for, and Google’s mindreading skills are improving each day).

Whether you’re a user or a marketer, text-based search ads are very hard to dislike – and it’s great to see this basic truth of digital marketing validated by Hubspot’s survey.