When you are too familiar with advertisement banners on a website, you seem to ignore the ads. You just want to jump right into the answer you were looking for and pretend the ad wasn’t even there. Ignoring banner ads online is called “Banner Blindness”. Banner blindness can be caused by users that are rushing to read the contents instead of looking around the websites. It can also be caused by “ads fatigue” experienced by users because of seeing too many ads.
For example, you visit a website to read a specific news. So, your goal is to answer your curiosity instead of looking for a product to buy. Whether you are consciously or unconsciously ignoring the ads, you have practiced banner blindness. It is not necessarily that the ad design is bad. It can also be caused by the ad being “too ad-like” and irrelevant. So, your ad might not be engaging enough to draw a user’s attention. Banner blindness can affect the reduction of your ad engagement and CTR (click-through rate). You might have experienced loss of revenue and low return of investment (ROI).
To tackle banner blindness, you need to follow these tips so your ad can engage more.
Tackling Banner Blindness
Making ads and campaigns can be very challenging. But, you can always use many different ways to make your ad stand out. To avoid user banner blindness, you can follow these steps below.
1. Avoid “ad-like” Design
Sometimes using bright colors and hard selling words doesn’t work. Try to use camouflage by using the same color theme on your websites. Maybe it is not so noticeable and stands out, but it can blend with your content so the users don’t consider it an ad at first glance. Like this banner ad:
2. Use Readable Font
Avoid difficult-to-read fonts like Papyrus or Bradley Hand. Use clean-look or geometric like Gotham, Century Gothic, Nobel, Metro, or Poppins instead. Readability is helpful to make your ad noticeable and a better chance to be read.
3. Follow Ad Hierarchy
Always follow ad hierarchy. This allows you to use space efficiently. The hierarchy should include:
- Company logo. Company logo should be in an ad to make the audience familiar with your company. It can also make an association so the audience psychologically associates your brand with certains color or shape in your logo.
- Offer to attract audiences, such as discount, sale, or unique selling of your product (long term, unique, premium, etc.)
- Call to Action button. CTA is important to make a command for users to perform a desired action. For example, “join now”, “sign up”, or “buy now”.
Example of good ad with good hierarchy :
4. Apply A/B Test
If you are still in doubt on which design to advertise, you can try the A/B test. A/B test is a test to determine if one design has a more positive response than the other. To do this, you can launch two different locations, colors, or designs and see which one has the higher conversion rate. To know the details about the A/B test, you can check this article.
5. Change Your Ad Placement
Users are often familiar with ad banner placement. Overtime, they learn to ignore the section so they don’t see it the next time they open a website.
To avoid this, try to change your ad placement. For example, instead of placing your ad banner on the right or left side, try placing it on top of the landing page like this:
Or you can place it in-between text like this ad :
Placing your ad in between the content makes your ad unavoidable to ignore because users tend to scroll down to read the whole article. So, make sure your ad is engaging enough so the user can click on your CTA ad button.
6. Be More Relevant
Nothing is more important than making your ad relevant to your audience. Relevancy can be very useful because it is one of the elements required to make engaging content. Try to understand your audience, what they like and don’t like, the language that they use, etc.
To know whether your ad is relevant, do the following :
a. Inline with the audience’s tendencies
b. Keywords are matched with audience search
c. Relevant picture
d. Use SEO-friendly ad link
So these were some of the tips to avert banner blindness.
Banner advertising can be very helpful if you do it in the right manner.
Don’t be afraid to test different ideas. Experiment with innovative and creative design on your ad. Make sure it is relevant and engaging to tackle banner blindness. If you are still confused about how to tackle banner blindness and make a more engaging ad, we’ve got your back! Pameo has the best service that can provide you from branding to selling your product online! Contact us at halo@pameo.co and you are good to go!