Ad Blockers: One of Our Enemies
Hi, everyone,
A few days ago, I was having trouble with some Amazon image links on my website. The links seemed to be broken and re-inserting them didn't fix anything.
Now, let me tell you I always use Chrome when working. I have an ad blocker installed and it had never occurred to me until now that this ad blocker was the cause of all my troubles. So I checked my site on other browsers and the Amazon image links were working fine, but not so on Chrome. The funny thing is that my links didn't work on Chrome even though I deactivated the ad blocker running on my site.
All of this made me think of one important thing: How are we going to reach our customers if they run ad blockers on their browsers? We can use simple links, I know that. But what about image links and Google ads? What about banners and widgets? Our readers won't see our sites the way we wanted them to. We designed our sites with something in mind, but navigating through them with ad blockers blocking our ads defeats the purpose.
Many people use ad blockers because yeah, let's face it, ads can be annoying. There are sites inundated with ads all over the place so it's no wonder many people look for ways to block them.
What can we do about this? Is there any work around? I'd like to know. What are your thoughts about this?
Enrique
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Thank Enrique for sharing, good to know about. I want to know if exist this problem with Amazon text links,too?
Hi, Alketa,
The problem seems to be specifically with image links. I haven't had any problems with text links.
Thank you for bringing this up. I use chrome and when i use amazon text+link on my website it never works for me even after removing ad blocker. Looking forward to solution to this problem as well. Thank you
Hi, Pranali,
Have you checked if your links work on other browsers though? Or is this something that only happens with Chrome?
For the Amazon ads, I've been taking screen shots of the item and inserting them as an image and connecting the image to the object using the code in behind that allows you to make an image into a clickable URL.
Hi, Darlene,
Many people do that, but Amazon frowns upon it. I don't know what consequences may arise, but it's always recommended to use Amazon Bar Stripe and insert all links from there. The problem is if users have ad blockers running on their browsers, they won't see our ads. :(
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Wow! Good to know