Three Ways to Reduce Banner Blindness
If you display your own ads or buy ads from another website, the following methods might help to reduce the likelihood of banner blindness.
- Ad Rotation. This is a common method used by webmasters to ensure that visitors don’t immediately overlook the specific ads they run. In the case of contextual ads, you can run rotate ads of different color schemes and formats. This might be useful although I recommend tracking clicks to monitor its effect. Wordpress powered blogs can use the Wpads plugin or Ad Rotator plugin.
- Incorporate Tagline and Unique Names. I’ve not seen this mentioned elsewhere but I think it will definitely improve the clickthrough rate. The trick is to make your ad message a similar variation or spin on the tagline or name of the site you are advertising on.
For example, if you’re running a banner ad on Dosh Dosh, a tagline like ‘making money online‘ or some variation of that will increase the perceived relevance or usefulness of the ad. Use of the site name (”Dosh Dosh”) might help as well, but do confirm if the site owner is fine with attaching their name to your ad.
- Use Images of Faces. Nielsen mentions that the use of faces will attract visitor attention and I do think this is true. You don’t have to include racy pictures of cleavages but you can include an attractive face in your ad in order to make it stand out from the rest of the site.
Most content-heavy websites feature lots of text and the use of faces in ads may ‘humanize’ the overall experience of the site. Here’s an example of a banner ad that uses a pretty face to attract visitors:
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