Ad blockers or not, mobile engagement is becoming more important to advertisers.

More advertising is coming for wearable and mobile devices as well as online sites despite the growing popularity of ad blocking software, according to a new report from Juniper Research. Mobile advertising has already surpassed online in popularity, Juniper says, and the trend will continue.

One reason is that – so far – ad blockers haven’t focused on wearables and mobile.

As more solutions are found to ad blockers, Juniper forecasts that mobile-focused advertising will surge to $285 billion by 2020, growing at an average annual rate of 22 percent.

Such spending is expected to total $160 billion this year.

To help overcome ad blockers, companies will utilize better audience targeting to increase click-through rates and thus improve marketing appeal, Juniper says in hts Worldwide Digital Advertising 2016-2020 analysis.

“Publishers, such as Facebook, are utilising their unprecedented audience knowledge to offer advertisers highly accurate targeting, thereby increasing the click through rates that advertisers are witnessing now,” said Sam Barker, author of the Juniper report.

A key driver will be improved real-time bidding processes for targeted ads from exchangers, including Rubicon Project and Fiksu, Juniper notes. “By streamlining the bidding process, page load times are reduced – increasing the user experience,” Juniper concludes.

But ad blockers are likely to become more popular in the mobile space, Juniper warns.

“[M]obile ad blocking adoption is expected to increase over the next 5 years as users bring the benefits of the technology onto their mobile devices,” Juniper says. “The research also warned that publishers will have to contend with the introduction of network level ad blocking, currently being deployed by the UK mobile operator Three.”

A whitepaper, ‘Digital Advertisers vs The Ad Blockers’, is available to download at:

http://www.juniper.com