What is banner blindness? This is a deliberate disregard for banner advertising on the site by its visitors. That is, the banner seems to be there, but it is perfect unclickable and does not bring the expected result.
Have you already encountered this phenomenon? Or do you ignore banners on other people’s sites? Did you know that banner advertising does not notice more than a third of all users? Why is this happening and how to fix the situation? Let’s try to understand all this in more detail.
Banner blindness and its causes
It has been proved: even useful thematic banners placed in the hottest areas of the site’s pages will still be ignored by every third visitor. The brain of a modern Internet user, tired of the abundance of advertising, simply ceases to respond to it over time. As a result, everything that we can recognize as an advertising banner automatically falls into the “dead zone” of our attention.
Neither the brightness of the color nor the resizing and positioning of the banners saves the situation. But after all, they have long been considered one of the most popular ways to monetize a site. And what? Is the time for banner advertising irrevocably gone?
How to defeat banner blindness?
Studies show that we all browse the pages of Internet sites according to a certain pattern that resembles the Latin letter “F”. That is, we pay attention to the top area of the page – the “heading” of the site, we look with interest at the left side of the page (where information is most often located) and pay attention to the middle of the pages where images are usually located.
The same statistics indicate that more than 60% of users carefully look at the left side of the page, while only about 30% look at the right. And only every fifth visitor to the site peeks at the page scrolling line.
Want to increase the effectiveness of banner advertising? Place it where the visitor can see and correctly perceive the information. Experiment with heatmaps of the site, determine the “hottest areas of the pages”, and create banners of various sizes. All of this will increase their clickability and make banner advertising much more effective and more noticeable.
Another way to deal with banner blindness is to show creativity in advertising. You can experiment with color, text content, and banner design. You can choose not entirely honest methods (for example, arrange a banner in the form of a computer system message).
But this can cause a negative reaction of users, although, undoubtedly, it will make the banner noticeable. Another effective trick is masking the banner for site navigation elements. But such tricks are also not too welcome by the audience vumoo. However, sometimes it’s such techniques that allow you to “destroy the patterns” of thinking.
Banner blindness is a consequence of excessive advertising burden on users. We make banners ineffective by overloading pages with advertising.
Want to improve your banner’s performance? Make it visible by limiting the use of other advertising. Test advertising on the site, tracking the reaction of visitors. And draw conclusions based on the individual indicators of your site. Just because there are no universal solutions.
