You probably don’t click on ads, but they stick in your brain. You might see a half-dozen ads for Doritos, and then when you go to the store a week later, you’re slightly more likely to buy Doritos.
The vast majority of advertising is just getting a brand or an idea into the back of your head so when you’re looking for something in that product category, regardless of it’s a VPN, a web host, a snack food, a car, or whatever, you’re going to have a bias towards what you’ve seen in the past.
Most of my ad-blocking isn’t to stop myself from buying some herbal supplement/spray tanner combo, it’s to stop myself from being biased by the capitalist propaganda machine.
I am not immune from advertisements, and neither are you.