Apple’s iOS 9 update released Sept. 16 allows consumers with newer iPhones to download software that will block advertising consumers would otherwise see when they visit websites via a smartphone browser. It’s a handy feature for consumers who don’t want to be bombarded with ads, but it can pose significant problems for any company with a mobile site, including mobile retailers.

That’s because some ad blockers, such as Crystal, have a default setting preventing the display of content with tracking codes or content from vendors that share data with advertising companies. That’s because it deems such content as an ad, even though it may not be, or it deems the content as an invasion of privacy since it is tracking consumer activity. This can create major problems for online retailers, says Chris Mason, CEO of technology vendor Branding Brand.

“If you think of a retailer’s website, (oftentimes) 50% of that page experience is brought by third parties loading assets onto your site,” says Mason, who says a tracking tag can raise a red flag for the ad-blocker or a third-party itself because of its affiliation with an advertising company. Crystal did not respond to a request for comment.

This is the first time Apple has allowed developers to create apps that allow ad blocking on the Safari mobile browser. When the iOS update rolled out in September, a handful of retailers, including Walgreen Co. and Lululemon Athletica, reportedly encountered problems in which key functions of their mobile site failed to display to shoppers, such as main images. A Lululemon spokeswoman says the retailer is looking into the issue, but declined to comment further. A Walgreens spokeswoman says consumers that had the ad-blocker may have encountered display issues, but it has fixed the appropriate pages.  

Problems for other retailers weren’t as serious as main images being blocked. However, retailer Diamond Candles is having problems with A/B tests it runs through technology vendor Optimizely, says Diamond Candles CEO Justin Winter. The retailer tests alternative treatments of a page to see if consumers respond to one version better than the other, such as having a blue Buy button versus a pink Buy button. Once the retailer decides which treatment is better it redirects 100% of the traffic to the winning page until the change can be hard coded into Diamond Candles’ e-commerce platform. Once the change is made, the retailer turns off the test.

“We use Optimizely as an easy, marketer-friendly way to change things on our website to help improve conversion rates and sell more stuff,” Winter says.

But consumers using the Crystal ad blocker are not be redirected to the winning look and instead see an old version of the Diamond Candles mobile site that doesn’t convert as well, Winter says.

The retailer hasn’t determined how to fix the problem yet, and the issue has not impacted Diamond Candles’  bounce rate, conversion rate or sales, Winter says.

“It is likely that the percent of our audience that has this content blocker is so minimal that the effect is really nothing at this point,” Winter says.  

In fact, ad blockers affected only 0.1% of on smartphones and tablets page views in the U.S. according to ComScore Inc. and Sourcepoint in “The State of Ad Blocking 2015,” published this September. Mason, however, suspects that this number will continue to grow as more consumers adopt iOS9.

9.0% of U.S. ad agency professionals think ad-blocking software across all devices is a major concern, and 46.3% say it is somewhat of a concern, according to a survey of 80 U.S. ad agency professionals in May 2015 advertising agency Strata Marketing Inc.

Some ad blockers are less aggressive than Crystal in their default settings, such as Purify Blocker, which is currently the No. 2 most-downloaded paid app overall in the Apple app store.

“If you are downloading Purify and decide to use the default setting, you should have very little problems with content delivery,” Mason says.

Part of the appeal of ad blockers is that they not only block ads, they also speed up mobile site performance since more elements are blocked, Mason says. In fact, Purify Blocker’s tagline is “No Ads. No Tracking. Lightning-fast Safari.”

Web performance vendor Catchpoint Systems Inc. ran a test of a how fast mobile sites performed with and without the Pi-Hole ad blocker turned on and found that the average mobile page size decreased 18% and that mobile page load times fell 23% on average, says Dritan Suljoti, chief product officer and co-founder of Catchpoint. 

Even if retailers figure out how to get their mobile sites to display properly, what’s alarming about some of the ad blockers is the loss of tracking, Mason says. That means personalization and recommendations might not appear. Mobile retailers also can have problems seeing  which ad brought a consumer to the site.

“Your Omniture, your Google Analytics, your Coremetrics, those things aren’t registering the users on the site,” Mason says. “The more people who download ad blocker, the more we are going to have an issue.”

So what can retailers do? First, Mason suggests seeing if their mobile site is affected by reaching out to all third-party providers that contribute to the m-commerce site and working them to change any coding that could flag their applications as advertising.

Suljoti recommends retailers also look at their code and change any file path names that contain words an ad-blocking software could flag, such as banner, ad and skyscraper, a term for a kind of online ad. For example, if the image at the top of a mobile site is named “home page banner,” the ad blocker could completely take it out because “banner,” a type of ad unit, is part of the name, Suljoti says.

For consumers, if a web page fails to load correctly, Crystal’s FAQ page directs consumers to hold down the refresh button on Safari to load the page without Crystal.

Apple recently released a statement that it had removed a few apps from the App Store that it says were a security concern. Reports say these apps were ad-blocking software apps. Apple did not respond to a request comment.   

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