How to Reverse Banner Blindness in Facebook Ads?

Each day, we are all bombarded with loads of information via our phones, tablets, TVs, and so on. If we all decided to retain all the information that was thrown at us, we would never have enough brain capacity to deal with our tasks. To avoid this, our brains have this unique way of shielding us from banner ads (that we may or may not be interested in), and this has affected marketers for decades. This phenomenon is called Banner Blindness, and unfortunately, your Facebook ads could be a victim of this, too. 

To be sure if your ads are suffering from this same issue, and if so, making sure to get out of this rut is vital. To do that successfully, read this guide to the end to find out how your ads can overcome banner blindness.

What Is Banner Blindness and Is It Something To Be Worried About?

Banner blindness is very real, and it might have happened with you, too.

Think about it, have you ever browsed through Facebook and completely ignored the ads that are displayed on the sides unconsciously? If you did, then yes, you experienced banner blindness.

And you are not alone in this, a study suggests that 86% of customers experience banner blindness. That is a scary stat. Imagine putting all that effort into creating an ad for it to go completely unnoticed. It is every marketer’s worst nightmare.

But thankfully, there are ways you can identify that this is happening and troubleshooting methods that you can use to get out of it. To do that, first, you need to understand why banner blindness happens. 

Why Are Customers Blinded To My Banner Ads?

Many factors contribute to banner blindness, some of which are:

1. They Know Where You Are

How do customers actively ignore banner ads? Because they know where the ads will be placed.

Simply put, even before heading into Facebook, you know the content you came for will be in the centre, with ads flanking the top and right-hand sides. This kind of predictability makes it easy for the consumer to avoid your ads.

For example, a text scanning method called F-Pattern was identified. In which they found an interesting point that people who check out phone screens and web pages tend to first read the top and then go straight to the left-hand side of the screen. This correlates with right-hand ad placement and how it gets ignored.

2. Ad Fatigue

When you see an ad repeatedly over a limited period, you get irritated. No matter how relevant the product is to your life, you will still find it quite irritating.

And sooner or later, you will end up ignoring it. This is another one of the reasons why banner blindness could be caused.

But this situation could be quite easily handled because Facebook ads have a particular setting especially for these scenarios. When creating your ads in Facebook Ads Manager, you can easily cap the times you want an ad to be shown to a person in a particular period. 

By utilizing this setting smartly, you can prevent your audience from seeing the ad repeatedly. But they will still see it in a good enough frequency so that your brand recall is not affected.

3. You are targeting irrelevant people

If someone is a dog person and they keep on getting cat feed videos, obviously, they are not going to be interested. They might not even like getting these ads on their feed.

This is why knowing who your audience is is very important. Because if you are going to be targeting irrelevant people, then you need to brace yourself for banner blindness.

4. Ad Style

Ads have a predetermined layout, and most ads are in the same format. With bold colored backgrounds, flashy texts, and fancy formats, ads can be easily spotted from a mile away.

Not just to seasoned professionals, the normal day-to-day consumer also knows these attributes, and that is how they filter ads from their brain and focus on what matters. 

Predis AI knows these issues and keeps them in mind when creating social media and ad templates that will garner attention even in a crowded Facebook feed. You could even create your own Facebook ad here and check out how effective our templates are.

5 Ways To Improve Banner Blindness in Facebook Ads

Now that we have a clear understanding of the reasons behind banner blindness, here are some effective ways in which you can overcome it:

1. Change Ad Placement

We know that your customers know where your ads are placed, and that is how they successfully ignore your ads. So, in that case, the best course of action is to surprise them!

Looking for ads on the right-hand side of your Facebook pages? Switch up the placement a little bit to surprise your viewer and reduce your chances of getting ignored.

2. Choose Your Audience Wisely

Facebook offers a myriad of options for marketers to ensure they pick the right set of audiences for their ads and make the most of their budgets.

Some of how you can choose your audience are as follows:

• Custom audience selection: You can choose your own set of audience by geotargeting and other demographic factors such as age, preferences, and so on.
• Upload your customer list: Have a list of customers already on your roster, then it is time to put this information to work. Upload your existing customer list and target them with retention phase ads.
• Lookalike audience: If you have your customer list uploaded already, then you can use this list to create Lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences are created by Meta by finding common attributes between your customers and finding new customers that have similar interests.
• Advantage + audiences: If you have no idea who your audience is, then this option is the best fit for you. With Advantage +, Meta uses its advanced algorithm to find people who might be interested in your product. Although this feature could be a hit or a miss, it is worth giving a shot if you are a beginner.

3. Reduce Ad Fatigue

As discussed before, a potential customer seeing your ads repeatedly can prove to be more counterproductive. So, ensuring your ads do not irritate your customers is important in maintaining your brand reputation.

And this can be easily achieved by utilizing the frequency capping option in the Meta Ads Manager. As a general rule of thumb, showing the same ad 1 or 2 times per week is more than enough; anything more than that can cause more harm than good.

4. Switch Up Your Ad Style

As for your ad style, experiment with new ones every time to see the kind of ads that make your audience notice your ads. Some of the ad creative tips you can experiment with are as follows:

• Use white spaces strategically to capture attention.
• Incorporate brand elements to make your ad improve your brand recall.
• Use dynamic elements such as GIFs and videos to gather attention.
• Create high-quality images that have an emotional impact. (Fun fact: Did you know that having smiling, happy people in your ad images actually improves your trustworthiness?).

5. Check if your ad is effective

Sometimes, banner blindness might not be the problem. Your ad could be the problem. But, how will you know if that is the case?

Here is when A/B testing comes in to help.

To conduct an A/B test, you can put two different ad creatives in circulation and target the same set of your audience. Check how they perform. Does one ad type perform better than the other? If it does, analyze the said ad again to see factors that could be contributing to this positive impact.

You can do an A/B test in iterations with focus on a specific element, to find out a combination that works best for your brand.

Predis AI makes this process easy by having an in-built editor that allows easy editing of creatives. It also provides suggestions based on your previous creatives to help create an ad that will be successful.

3 Benefits of Avoiding Banner Blindness

Since you are going to go to great lengths to ensure your ads do not get blindsided with banner blindness, you should know what benefits you will be getting. Some of them are:

• Ad Click-through rate improvement: What happens when your ad comes out of the blind spot? More people see your ads, some are interested, and click on them. This means more people enter your sales funnel, and your ad becomes a success.
• Brand engagement: When an ad performs, your brand and business get more engagement, which then translates directly to sales and conversions.
• ROAS Improvement: This is something you must have guessed on your own, that more people clicking on your ads means more people converting and thus a huge improvement to your Return on Ad Spend.

Final Thoughts

Getting out of the blind zone is only half the battle won. To get conversions, your ad strategy and creatives have to be on point, which is not easy to get right. But with Predis AI, you can get conversion-worthy ad creatives within a matter of minutes with or without design skills.

You can either leverage our AI capabilities to do the heavy-lifting for you and create attractive ads or you can use our library of templates to design your own with our built-in editor. Predis AI can help you manage all your social media platforms without your active participation.

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