Earn Money Online Blog

Fighting Ad Blindness

If you have a website that sells adspace, or has text ads you’ve probably heard the term “ad blindness”. (If you haven’t heard it you should think about the concept.) The idea is that people regularly seeing ads ultimately become desensitized to them and “tune them out”. In terms of web pages that means they may ignore entire sections of the page, text in certain colors, whatever appears to their experience to be an advertisement. I’ve even known people to miss out on page navigation if it’s on the right hand side of the page because they are just used to ads being over there and don’t pay attention to that area (we may explore that idea a bit more later….)

What kinds of things can be done to fight ad blindness?

One thing you can do is to

place ads in unexpected places. I know we’ve seen newspapers play with this, articles that seem to trail off in mid thought right into an ad, to be continued on another page.

Another approach can be to change the look and feel of the ads. Anyone who has seriously done adsense on their pages has probably heard a thousand times to “test test test”. They give you plenty of opportunities to do tests with different channels for different ad designs, you should take advantage of this.

I found this interesting adsense idea randomizing the color palette in your google adsense ads. This way, your visitors will see different color ads each visit. That would make it harder to ignore the ads.

I remember one of my early sites changing ad colors from a “match the site content” blue to a contrasting red got quick results, but over time they faded, switching back brought similar impressive results at first and then tapered back to lower levels as well.

This forum post asks about the best colors for adsense, but essentially winds up back at the randomization idea that we talked about earlier.

Hopefully this has given you some good ideas for fighting ad blindness, good luck with your efforts.

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