Psychological Tricks To Combat Banner Blindness And Increase ADsence CTR.

Ad or banner blindness has been a huge impact for the advertising companies. People are being accustomed to ads more and more these days. They are predictably ignoring the ads or banners they come across while browsing the web.

People are ignoring ads because they have developed banner blindness as a habit. Any behavior that is repeated over and over again gets imprinted in our neural pathways and becomes our habit. According to a study published by Infolinks, 86% of Consumers Suffer From Banner Blindness. This is also the main reason why sponsored content is on-demand these days and Google has also adopted it recently.

For bloggers, this means the decrease in blog revenue by the decline in AdSense revenue and affiliate sales. The ads put on the sidebar of the blog is being often ignored completely.

If you think that you are getting poor click through rate when compared to the ad impressions on your blog, then you are in the right place.

In this post, I’m gonna share with you some of the less-known psychological tricks that you can adopt to combat banner blindness and increase the revenue from your blog/site.

These tips are also completely applicable to increase AdSense earnings by increasing the ad CTR.

Let’s dive in.

Place banner ads in strategic positions

Banner ads placed in the obvious positions like sidebar gets ignored most of the times.

Display the most important ads on your site above the fold. Above the fold area of the web page refers to the upper 75% of the page where according to the eye track studies, people are more active and receptive. It also works because of the fact that “77% of the web users do not scroll at all!” – 

Include ads inside the blog post content. This is one of the most less utilized tricks to increase the CTR of the ads. People when they are reading the content, and come across the ads, they would not ignore it.

Place ads where people are in action mood. When you are about to command your readers to take any action, people are likely to notice ads and click on it. Actions may include asking them to download a file, subscribing or asking them to share the blog post. You must bring the readers from passive receptive state to active state to let them clicking on your ads and hence increase CTR.

For this, you can make use of plugins like Advanced Ads. It lets you inject ads anywhere inside the blog post automatically based on selected blog posts or categories.

Maintain relevancy

People likely click on banners that are relevant to them. For this, you need to tailor the ads based on the interests of your readers. Or may be related to the content your reader is reading. The major ad networks like AdSense does this automatically to maximize the clicks.

Whereas, if you are manually including the affiliate or any other banners on your blog, make sure the banner content is relevant to the content on the web page so that people find the ad relevant.

To accomplish this, you can make use of plugins like Content Aware Sidebars. It lets you display the sidebar widgets in accordance to the content on the web page.

If you are displaying health-related banner ad on a finance related site, no one gonna click on that.

Animate your banners

When ads are static people likely won’t notice it. making use of CSS animation feature, you can make your banner ads to animate when the visitors scroll the page or when the ad space comes to the viewpoint.

You can make use of the plugin called Animate it!

The animate feature is widely used in conversion focused landing page. Along with that, you can also make use of animation feature to display your banner ads effectively.

Minimalistic theme

If you want your banners to be seen and clicked, a minimalistic clean design is the best bet. It is a common understanding that when there are little elements for users to distract away from ads, they are likely interact with the ads.

White background for the content works well.

That’s the reason why most of the AdSense WordPress themes are minimalistic in nature and have few elements to distract away the readers and stay readers hooked in.

You may also remove all the unwanted elements from your current theme so that your blog visitors’ attention will be drawn to banner ads.

Over to you

The key point here is to decrease the clutter on your web page, demand user attention by increasing the relevancy of the ads.

Along with this A/B or split testing the banner ads also yields good results as always. Experiment with different ad positions, text, size, and format of the ads.