Combating banner blindness - share your tips!

aghh yes goos thing i implemented skining into my site

 

For my site, I think the visitors break down 50%-50% new-returning. Another aspect is the page views per visit.

I find that rotating ad formats works well to keep the ads visible even to returning users.

As for colors, the rotation includes bright and blended color themes. Interestingly, neither is more effective. Some days the brightly color ads have the highest CTRs, and some days it's the blended ads. I don't really care as long as they get clicked

PS - Sorry to reply so late - I've been away.

 

My only tip is not to put all your ads in the same location on ALL your pages. Try to vary it so visitors won't simply ignore various locations. For instance, if they enter one page with the ads on top and the side in leaderboard, why not have other pages with links on top and ads at the bottom, etc. I've seen that this does quite well for CTR.

 

ad colours rotation + changing ad location regularly

 

I found quite a few good tips from Traffic Secrets that were very effective for Banner Ads.

And beleive it or not simple is most effective. This is probably already known by many. But using just a "text" banner add with a catchy title that provokes interest will get the best results.

Also having a call to action within the banner ad is important as it tells the user to actually do something. Usually just a "click here to find out more" is sufficient.

This may not suite the design and layout of your site (e.g if you had a site on graphic design, it probably wouldnt be the best)

But in most cases can perform extremely well.

Brad

 

I like what they did a christianmusician.com. The banner is set a space that looks designed for the banner including a drop shadow that is subtle (not looking like something some one did with a Photoshop 97 tutorial). The space has the shadow and a banner rotator is used.

 

The highlited banner "trick" sucks!! Why?? Because I don't want to "trick" my users into doing ANYTHING... that is NOT a good way to build a customer base or a following on a forum.

 

That's certainly true. All of the tricks and tips in this and other threads have to strike a balance between user experience and conversion. Spam/blackhat pages do not care about user experience but focus solely on conversion. Whitehat is slightly different

 

blend ad to background and warp it with images