Banner advertising is a struggling beast, and as the massive pay per click industry depends on it, something had to change.
‘Banner blindness’ is the name given to the new-found ability of the brain to ignore any piece of a website that looks like an advertising banner. It’s not just an invention of SEO and web marketing types, but a well established and well understood phenomenon. Some internet users choose to block ads with software, others are so used to gaudy banners along the top of their browser screens that they simply don’t see them any more.
Making ads stand out from the background has been the favourite method of combating banner blindness for years. The idea has been to make ’em bigger, make ’em brighter, and in extreme cases make ’em flash on and off or jump around the page. This strategy didn’t work, and annoying Flash-based PPC ads only really served to drive more people to install better ad blocking software.
Every impression that doesn’t result in a click is lost revenue, so obviously this banner blindness thing is a serious problem for AdWords and other PPC systems.
A couple of PPC providers got clever and started placing ads away from the usual locations, eg in sidebars, and this probably did work for a little while. Then, of course, users got used to an ad in the right hand sidebar and started ignoring it. The human brain is quick to adapt.
Google’s new search engine results page format takes a completely different approach to PPC ad placement. Smart cookies that they are, Google realised that making ads stand out is not the answer. The paid ads that now appear on their results pages now look more like organic search results than ever before. They blend in almost seamlessly, and even the most jaded internet brain has to actually look at the ads to decide whether or not they are in fact ads at all.
Seeing and reading are the first steps along the way to clicking a PPC ad. Will this new strategy drive up click through rates? Who knows, but I expect we’ll see more steathly advertising and less neon colours and flashy graphics in the near future.