Hey Yall, What are your thoughts on "banner blindness" - a term some used to describe what happens when users automatically ignore banner ads because they are constantly inundated with them? We can design more and more banners until the cows come home but are audiences slowly becoming immune? What are your thoughts on pop-ups and ads that cover page content in an effort to combat banner blindness?
I blame cell phones. It's somewhat tricky to display banner ads on them. So, publishers choose to opt out of banner advertising. Banner ads are still effective. If they have decent graphics and the right audience they can outdo text ads be far. But as I said, I blame cell phones and mobile devices in general for the decline in banner advertising. When I first started with AdSense back in 2005, banner ads used to outperform text ads. Then it became progressively worse. I don't think pop-ups / pop-unders are the answer. Everybody hates those.
1. Flooding your target audience with banner ads is not a great trick to win them. 2. Make banner ads on topics according to a proper campaign planing. 3. While designing banner ads follow the simple rules of it. e.g for facebook just check the facebook ads guide available. 4. Pop up ads can be annoying if they are harmful or if they cover up half of the page when displayed. 5. check this site for pop-up ads: https://www.myoptimind.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-pop-ups/
Banners are still effective, but then people now ignore them. It is better to make ads that directly target the market than making banners. It is like road billboards and the like--you see them, but then they are only effective if people respond to them. Making banners along with targeted ads would be more successful.
I can say for myself, I don’t notice banners when browsing. It’s like your brain blocks out what you don’t want to see. Plus, all those Adblocks don’t help your banner get noticed. As for pop-ups - annoying as hell and associates with useless products that no one needs.
I would think banner blindness is a myth because of the following: 1. People have been talking about this for over a decade 2. Banner ads have never gone away 3. Google Adsense went to pushing users to use both text and display ads, with display ads being banners Just my 2 cents...
I think the style of banner has a pretty big affect. Staying away from the stereotypical banners that screen click me are more easily ignored.
We do banner ads quite often but more for branding purposes rather than conversion, banner conversions are extremely low and are not logical for most products or services. Some new HTML5 banners, dynamic banners and Gif banners show some promises but again conversion is abysmal. Depending on the industry and target audience you can get different results. I believe in banner blindness among the younger generation and tech savvy people, we see that in our results, the more tech savvy the audience the less result we get. Older generation such as farmers (we target quite often through mobile ads or website for weather forecast) show considerably more interaction.
Especially if it's a younger audience, work with ad vendors that can give them what they want. Contact Kixer, that's one to get ya started. They offer mobile/phone-based ads like app installs, etc..