Every blogger knows the importance of banner click through rates on their web pages. It’s not rocket science. The more people that click on on a blogger’s ads, the more valuable the ad spaces become, and the more money the website makes. The problem is, as the internet has evolved, so too has its users.
What is banner blindness?
In the olden days of the internet (yes, I’m referring to ten years ago), people clicked on advertisements left and right because they didn’t know any better. As people have become more accustomed to web page layouts, they’ve begun to learn which parts of the page are the most valuable. It just so happens that since most websites place advertisements on the top, left, right, and bottom of a webpage (overkill!) the “guts” of a web page are usually in the center. Take a look at the heat map below, which measures eye tracking when visitors look at a webpage.
The areas where users looked the most are colored red while the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements. The phenomenon, coined by Dr. Jakob Nielsen in August of 2007, is referred to as banner blindness. As you might guess, banner blindness basically means that visitors are “blind” to banners (advertisements), making them ineffective in terms of earning revenue.
As internet users become more and more skilled at ignoring ads, ad driven websites (including blogs) are facing a growing crisis. If internet users stop clicking on ads, then advertisers will stop renting ad spaces from publishers, and free content services and blogs will start to disappear. What can we do to overcome banner blindness?
The golden rule for overcoming banner blindness
The trick to overcoming banner blindness is to do the opposite of what you might expect, make the advertisements less visible and look less like advertisements. The reason people have become so skilled at ignoring banners is because the ads are in the same locations from site to site, and they all look about the same. They usually stand out from the rest of the page with an image that doesn’t match the rest of the site, or text that’s a different font, size, or color.
Since these ads stick out like sore thumbs, it’s easy for visitors to subconsciously block them out. It’s kind of like telephone poles. When you drive to work, how many telephone poles do you see? Most likely, your answer will be “none” even though you pass by hundreds each and every day. You don’t notice them because they don’t provide you with important information while driving from point A to point B.
On the flip side, if you can incorporate advertisements inside your content instead of around it, you will see a much better click through rate. A great example of this technique has just been implemented by Digg.com a few months ago. If you take a look at Digg today, you’ll see a very cleverly disguised advertisement residing in the third Digg post of every page. As visitors scroll through each page looking for content of interest, there’s a great chance they’ll click on the disguised Digg post, sending that user directly to an advertiser’s website. As long as the user is being sent to a webpage containing useful content, It’s a win win situation. The visitor finds the information they were looking for and the publisher earns a small profit.
Banner blindness, you’ve met your match.
Tags: ads, advertisements, banner blindness, banner placement, Blogging