Preventing Ad Blindness

What is Ad Blindness?

The Wikipedia entry for Ad Blindness is:

Ad Blindness is a term used to denote the state of conscious or subconscious ignorance of advertisements placed in a web page by visitors due to various reasons like irrelevance, vanilla design and familiarization of the webpage layout. For example, ad blindness is a behavioral challenge presented by frequently re-visited portals like news portals, discussion forums and blogs.

So to make it simpler, Ad Blindness is when the advertisements on your site are being completely ignored by your usual visitors.  If you always have an advertisement in the upper right hand corner, your repeat visitors will learn that the upper right corner is for ad space and will start to ignore that area all together.  Countering Ad Blindness is an important strategy for keeping those advertising profits up.  It also can cause heavy ad areas to become blindspots, even when their is content or links added to the area.

Tips For Countering Ad Blindness

Here a few things you should experiment with on your site to help prevent add blindness. 

1. Change the Colors of your Ads.
2. Change the Locations of Your Ads.
3. Change the Types of Ads.
4. Swap some Picture Ads to Link Ads.
5. Change from Blended Ads to Contrasted Ads.

Often times you may notice a spike in ad clicks just by changing something as simple as the ads background color.  Make sure to test out locations and colors and keep good notes.  That way you can compare what works best and in what locations.

These tips help for all sorts of ads, whether it is AdSense, AdWords, Pay per click, or Affiliate advertising.