It’s no secret that working in digital advertising is definitely not for the faint of heart. Creating successful campaigns for your brand or multiple clients takes a significant amount of effort, the gusto to continuously learn about emerging marketing tools and technologies, and long hours at the office. Plus, with near-constant innovation in the mobile advertising sector, you must have the will to stay on top of mobile ad tech trends so you can continue to reach key consumers.

Additionally, if you’re lacking the creative vision to develop ads that deliver a better user experience, or if you fail to properly execute campaigns, your mobile-savvy competitors could steal your core customers — and then some.

So, if you are still one of the many marketers who hasn’t moved past using just mobile banner ads, or you haven’t thought about integrating more engaging ad types like video, interstitial, native and rich media, you may be destroying your campaigns before they even deploy.

Here’s how a bad mobile ad can kill your mobile advertising campaign, and how you can combat the problem before it kills your entire marketing strategy, too.

Consumers Could Block Your Bad Mobile Ad

While you may think that you’re running a great mobile ad campaign, if mobile users think your ads are annoying, too intrusive — or just plain ugly — they could block your ads by using ad blocker software. This means you may lose new customers before they even have a chance to click through — or worse, lose those customers that would’ve otherwise returned to make more purchases.

Mobile ad blockers are gaining in popularity, too. Over the last year alone, the use of mobile ad blockers has risen 90 percent, and in North America, 14 million people use mobile ad blockers on a regular basis. But while mobile ad blocker use is on the upswing worldwide (in emerging markets such as China and India, especially), consumers are also migrating from using mobile browsers (which have ad blocking features) and focusing their mobile time in-app. However, regardless of where mobile users spend their time, creating better mobile ads for both in-app and mobile web can help ensure that your core customers engage with your ads instead of deciding to block them.

You can best combat ad blocking by using a variety of ad types instead of relying solely on banner ads, which helps to create a better user experience. Try integrating rich media interstitials for a versatile, highly customized and personalized interaction. Or think about delivering native ads to your target audience for a more seamless experience within a site or app. Plus, video ads offer high levels of user engagement, too.

A Bad Mobile Ad Could Ruin Brand Perception

Even though mobile advertising has taken the world by storm in a big way (the rising popularity of mobile ad blockers is just one clear indication), many marketers still see mobile ads as just another check box when it comes to their overall advertising strategies. Because of this, mobile ad creative can sometimes become an afterthought — and fail miserably. Not only that, but if you aren’t adding a good mix of mobile ad types throughout your campaigns, your brand could lose out on both new and repeat customers.

Combining excellent mobile creative with a variety of ad types can deem your brand more trustworthy.

Simply being more thoughtful and creative about your mobile ad campaigns can alleviate the damage your bad ads may have caused. And seriously, stop reusing existing desktop ads for mobile. They’re ugly. They’re clunky. And your campaign will surely suffer. 

Your Mobile Ad Campaign Performance Could Plummet

This brings us to how your entire mobile ad campaign can fail if you continue to deliver bad ads. But how do you know your ad is actually bad? This is where mobile ad performance tracking comes in to play.

While lifting a bad mobile ad’s performance may seem difficult on the surface, mobile ad attribution tools can help alleviate the burden of having to manually track mobile ad engagements by adjusting your ads for you. This automated process can help increase conversions, downloads or sales — especially when you combine mobile ad attribution software with excellent mobile ad creative, and a mix of innovative mobile ad types. 

Your mobile advertising campaign doesn’t have to suffer from bad ads. In fact, you can create truly effective campaigns by simply being more mindful of your campaign outputs, and staying current on the IAB’s mobile display and design guidelines. Plus, once you decide to retrain your advertising brain to look past just the math and/or ROI, and can devote more of your time and attention to the creative side of your mobile ad campaigns by using automated mobile ad attribution tools, those bad ads won’t completely kill your strategy. And your job probably won’t suffer from a premature death, either.