How Ad-Injection Hurts Ecommerce: From Site Performance to Lost Sales

Despite the importance of online sales to ecommerce organizations, almost seven out of ten shoppers will abandon their shopping cart before completing their purchase.

While there are several reasons for this, an increasingly common problem is unauthorized ad injection, where online visitors are targeted by competitor or malicious ads. At best, these ads distract your potential customers from their task at hand, and at worst they will divert them away from your website to your competitors – hijacking your visitors’ experience and costing your business valuable conversions.

These injected ads might feature competitor ads, price comparisons, product recommendation widgets, banners or irritating pop-ups. Worse, they can feature adult content, which can damage your relationship with customers, who may associate your brand with an unsavory online experience.

This is disastrous for any business; customer experience (CX) is considered the new marketing battlefront with analyst Gartner estimating that that 81 percent of firms are competing based on it in 2019. Indeed, more than half (55 percent) of US shoppers say that just one bad experience would stop them from returning to a brand, according to a 2019 survey from alternative payments provider Klarna.

Nevertheless, it is estimated that 15 percent of shoppers see unwanted ads, coupons, deals and adult content injected into their browser on ecommerce sites, resulting in customer frustration and loss of business.

Slow loading pages

Injected ads can also affect website performance – particularly video ads. Slow loading pages are a major contributor to online visitors going elsewhere before completing their purchase. After waiting only three seconds for a page to load, two-thirds of shoppers will leave a website. According to Walmart and Amazon, every second after the three second mark costs retailers up to seven percent in conversion.

This is confirmed by a 2019 evaluation conducted of 80 major retail websites on their page speed performance and shopper experience. Retail Systems Research (RSR) discovered that consumers will not only abandon an ecommerce site merely because it’s slow, but they will also take definitive actions after leaving the site, such as buying from a competing retailer, complaining on social media or worse, never returning to the brand.

Website owners in the dark

One of the biggest challenges that ecommerce websites face is that these intrusive ads bypass server-side visibility, leaving businesses unaware that their website is being targeted. Therefore, you may be losing revenues without even being aware there is a problem – more than $25 billion worth of sales are reportedly lost to adware in the US alone.

The good news is that you can increase conversion rates by preventing unauthorized ad injections. Ensighten enables you to see which unauthorized ads are running on your site, and how they are displaying for your customers, and from here block unauthorized advertising injected onto your website to stop your customers from being diverted to other websites.

Don’t let customer journey hijacking result in abandoned shopping carts and lost revenue. Speak to Ensighten about how you can provide an exceptional, seamless online experience for your customers, every time, whilst increasing your online revenue conversion rates.