Ad blindness is a huge issue in the digital advertising world, with infolinks reporting a massive 86% of users experience it.
This is a huge blow for advertisers, who will be wasting ad spend placing their ads into ad slots which are then not seen by their target audience.
But what is ad blindness and what can be done to fix it?
Let’s take a look.
Quick Links
What is ad blindness?
Ad blindness, also known as banner blindness, is when a user consciously (or unconsciously) ignores online display ads.
It is a common problem for advertisers, as it can reduce the effectiveness of their campaigns – they pay for their ad to be loaded into an ad slot, and then the user completely ignores it and scrolls past.
You’ve more than likely done it yourself many times – an ad has been loaded between two paragraphs in an article you’re reading, but because you know it’s there you simply move from the paragraph above it to the paragraph below it without stopping to take in the ad itself.
Why does ad blindness occur?
There are a few reasons why ad blindness occurs.
People have acclimatised to online ads
One reason is that users have become very familiar with the appearance of online ads.
They have learned to recognize and ignore common ad sizes when they appear, like the MPU shown in the example at the start of this article.
It could be that users are so completely focused on the content of a website that they don’t even register the ads, but more likely than not they’ve learnt where ads usually appear and so know how to avoid them with ease.
Poor site placement
Ad blindness can also be caused by the placement of ads on a website.
Ads that are placed in areas where users are less likely to look, such as the sidebars or footer, are more likely to be ignored.
This is somewhat against what advertisers would expect, as these placements usually allow for much larger ad sizes to be used, such as the Skyscraper or Billboard ad.
Too many ads on the screen
The last reason for banner blindness is that there are simply too many ads on the user’s screen at the same time, which causes users to completely tune them out.
Think about it – if you load a webpage that has ads plastered everywhere, you’ll quickly tune them all out altogether.
You might give the first one or two you see a chance, but you’ll soon become aggravated at the ad load (the number of ads loaded at once), and thus start ignoring them.
How do you overcome ad blindness?
Despite ad blindness being a major challenge for online advertisers, there are a number of things that advertisers can do to overcome it, such as:
- Using creative and engaging ad formats – If you use ad formats that stand out like rich media or video ads, you’re more likely to overcome banner blindness and have users actually see (and potentially engage) with your ads.
- Targeting ads to specific audiences – If your ads are targeted to the right people, they’re more likely to want to see them. For example, if I’m a running enthusiast and I see an ad with a running shoe in the middle, I’m more likely to stop want I’m doing to see what the ad has to offer.
- Placing ads in high-visibility areas of a website – Choose ad formats that will show in positions likely to be seen, such as ads that can be shown in sticky ad placements (they maintain their place on the screen regardless of how much the user scrolls) or as pushdown ads, which loads right at the top of the screen above the existing content. All of this can be found in our Digital Ad Inventory Size Guide.
Closing remarks
In closing, while banner blindness can be a real problem for advertisers, if you know what you’re doing you can easily increase the chances your ads are seen, and with it how effective those ads are at driving results.
Keep things simple, stick to the basics, and monitor your ad viewability rate over time.
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