Banner Blindness And You

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Banner blindness is a phenomenon where users will naturally ignore advertisement banners, regardless of what they’re about or how relevant (or irrelevant) they are. For us publishers, it affects us because advertisers will be willing to pay less and less for an advertising method that does not work.

Eye-tracking studies have shown that a user’s eyes will beeline right for the content. That doesn’t only impact web advertising, but also other minor content suffers. (did you notice the date this article was posted before you started reading?)

What Can Publishers Do?

Poorly placed banners will often yield poor click-through’s and a generally poor audience. You need to be different. Here are some ideas:

Aggressive Placement - Banners should be placed aggressively or uniquely to attract as much attention to them (if this is what you desire).
Unique Dimensions - Users will recognize skyscrapers or other typical dimensions (768×90, 468×60) . Other dimensions might not be so immediately recognizable and might get a glance, and maybe even a click-through.
Unique Treatments - Users are used to brightly colored boxes full of information. What if you used something uncommon in advertising, some sort of transparency. I’ve done this with my own advertising as you can see with this example. This has been successful at returning click-through’s.

What Can Advertisers Do?

Advertisers with large budgets might be more inclined to do fewer media buys with larger companies, but that’s where a lot of customization is lost. You’ll see that the suggestions will be similar to what publishers can do.

Consider Buying Posts or Articles - Sponsored posts are not uncommon in the web world. You could always make it easier for the Publisher and write the article yourself. If users beeline straight for content, you’ve already got the user convinced to read what it is you’ve got to say. Make sure that everything is believable and doesn’t seem like an advertisement.
Advertise on Individual Websites - Instead of buying a clump of Page Views from a variety of websites in your target niche, consider going straight to a website’s operators and suggesting a new media type, banner dimension or file size. You would be able to get away with a little more creativity and maybe do something similar to what I’ve done.

Without being unique, you’re just another advertisement to overlook. Hope that helps.