Ad Blindness is the attitude extracted from the users on the web page who purposely or intentionally ignore a page element that they recognize as online ads. Ad blindness happens when users only focus their attention only on the content in which they are interested.
Users decide which page elements are worth looking at and experience with certain webpage patterns and types. Users learn to focus their attention on only valuable pages which are relevant to them to achieve their goals and ignore the elements which are not useful to them.
Which content elements on a web page signal an ad?
- Visual content that is like ad formats like GIFs or animated images, or images with a call-to-action.
- Ad-specific page placement are ads on a page that are placed on the right-hand side rail or sometimes in the banner of the page.
How does Ad Blindness affect publishers and why should they worry?
Many publishers believed that because Ad Blindness results in users ignoring ads, it will mainly impact advertisers and they cannot do much about it but this is not correct as Ad blindness also affects publishers.
AdSense publishers who are paid on a cost-per-click basis might feel the impact of ad blindness the most as fewer clicks mean lower revenue. Publishers who earn revenue on a CPM basis will also be affected because advertisers do not want to pay for ads with lower engagement rates.
Target ads to the audience
Ad relevance has a direct impact on engagement as there are users who are more receptive to personalized ads. Publishers should consider applying real-time bidding to serve more targeted ads.
Continually experiment with ad placements
A new way of re-engaging users with your ads is to fluctuate ad location and sizes. Because Over time users become used to a new website’s typical layout. There should be some tests carried out so unconventional ad placement will establish which is the most effective layout.
Invest in more engaging ad formats
Distinctive and unconventional ad formats play a very important role in attracting users’ interest. One of the options for this is video ads which yield much higher CPMs than any traditional and old display ads.
Quality over quantity
Not relevant and lower quality ads are one of the biggest reasons for the cause of Ad Blindness because users react pessimistically to being overloaded by irrelevant ads which offer little value. Having relevant and good quality ads will improve the user experience and make your inventory more valuable resulting in higher CPMs in the long run.
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