Minimizing Ad Blindness By Making Ads Relevant and Valuable

On the internet, online advertisements are one of the things that keep the gears moving. There's no denying that as more contents are posted on the web, the more ads will be shown. But how can content publishers do what they do if the audience are hating the ads they're seeing?

When digital age took off, display ads soared in popularity. Then came the time when consumers grew then consumers grew weary of banners. Now, almost every brand, agency and publisher on the internet are creating more compelling contents running in many channels. As advertisers once again stepped in looking new ways to harvest those potential visitors' attentions, things got dull once again but to whole new level.

People don't want to be sold to.

The reason for this is ad blindness. This is one of the reasons why publishers need to rethink their website/blog monetization strategies. Advertisers usually have multiple options, but as publishers, you need more than just creativity of placements.

Ad blindness

Blind For A Reason

People neglect something because they dislike it. When it comes to ad blindness, this occurs when visitors of a website are able to filter out information that they think is unnecessary. With this ability, people that get accustomed to how ads are shown, or where ads are mostly placed, can better "escape" ads without even thinking.

The main cause of ad blindness is relevancy. When ads are showing information that is irrelevant or unappealing, human's inborn capability of escaping things they don't like, kicks in.

However, no matter how visitors tend to avoid ads, it doesn't mean that they overlook those ads. Although we might not want to look at ads and escape them intentionally or unintentionally, we still see them from our eyes. And whatever is seen, is recorded to the brain to be processed.

Almost anything that comes into out line of sight, enters our field of perception. So despite our ability to filter out things we dislike by ignoring our senses, our ability to instantly detect and process things we see (online ads no matter where they are), is still and always present.

By understanding this fact, publishers should realize that they always have the potential to deliver ads, as long as their ads are indeed relevant and viewable.

Adding Value To Your Ads

As people are bombarded with ads no matter where they are on the web, ad blindness is a phenomenon that publishers have to have a workaround. A website is a canvas. As its pages are already occupied with contents with variety of topics, images, videos and other types visual enhancements, your ads should be placed somewhere that is less intrusive but appealing.

Since ad placements are generally similar from one website to another, following best practices that work for others is just one of the ways to improve ad quality and battle ad blindness. If you want to get creative, you can use another method in which you put your creativity in place to create something unusual.

Creating something new, or something that people are not yet familiar with, usually stands out more than others. This can battle ad blindness to a certain degree that is never achieved by others who managed to do things conventionally.

For example, your can create an unusual design that stands out. This will enable you to provide a non-standard ad space and ensure the demand for it.

Starting from promoting ads that are relevant to visitors, adding quality and value to them, and increasing their viewability. Successfully doing these can trigger a higher attention of visitors to ads without having to disrupt their online experience.

These factors however, won't provide you instant solution for ad blindness. But understanding the essentials can ensure your ability to serve the appropriate ads to the correct audience at any given moment wherever they are.

Experiments For More Experimenting

As your website/blog grows, there will be a certain time that you need to do things when you're not. This is experimenting with how people see you at a given time, taken from how the trends of web design and needs of information.

When concerning ads, viewability is on the most important aspect of battling ad blindness. As mentioned earlier, no matter how good a person is able to filter out ads from contents, as long as they can view it, their brains will process it no matter what.

Besides that, focusing on viewability is important since many online advertising platforms like Google, consider an ad unit to be viewable if at least half of its pixels are displayed on a screen for at least one second.

Experimenting with the most popular ad sizes and put them above the fold and not directly at the top of the page can be a start. Then you can experiment on vertical banners that will "stick" to the design no matter where they have scrolled down. Or initiate vertical banners just because they can stay within your visitors' range of vision for a longer periods of time. Then you can concentrate on putting some ads below the folds where they have lower chances to be seen.

Placing your ads near your main contents has been proven to receive better attention from visitors. These ads are essentially aimed to be native, making them blend with their surroundings (your contents) better. The reason for this is because visitors care most about your contents, and for this reason, they are much more likely to fix their eyes to the ads located in close proximity.

The next thing you may want to look is how in fact your audience scan your pages. In most cases, visitors read the first sentence or heading, move down and read another line, and then proceed to skim through the text vertically. Place the ads somewhere along this route to prompt people to look at the creatives.

But if your visitors mainly comes from the Middle East where people are more likely to read from right-to-left in general, it would be better if you don't opt for the F-shaped reading pattern as your ad placement. Instead you use the opposite (ᖷ).

The reason for this is to approach visitors on how their eyes are tracking. For most people on the web, the F-shaped pattern is how they scan web contents. If your visitors aren't coming from those categories, looking for another option can be necessary to increase the viewability of your ads.

What your ads should be is that they shouldn't just be "ads". The correct placement can also make ads to be a factor of design as they can make you pages more colorful and attractive.

By working on increasing your viewability, you can ensure that more creativity efforts you put, the more the chances for those ads to be seen and clicked.

You can however use a more aggressive strategy like placing ads where they are most seen but more intrusive, and indirectly prompt visitors to click on them. This can be easier to implement and have a faster reaction. It can however produce a short burst of effectiveness, but on a long-term, you're just making your visitors "blind" a lot faster. Doing this strategy can actually boost your ads impression faster, but you're also adding ad blindness to your site, especially for returning visitors.

Conclusion

The internet is indeed changing as the trends changes. To build an effective monetization strategy, publishers need to promote their relevant and high-quality contents to get the attention of human and search engine visitors.

For ads to be seen, publishers must find a way to minimize ad blindness by showing better, more relevant and more targeted ads. But as different websites/blogs have different layout in their design, as well as the diverse type of visitors, experimenting like using A/B testing method for example, is a must in order to max out your potential.

Ads are there to be seen. To some, ads may have been their ultimate source of revenue. But there are no better ads than those that complement contents in which people will find them relevant and valuable.

Related: Eliminate Banner Blindness: Make Your Advertisements Seen Again