A recent eyetracking study from MarketingSherpa vividly demonstrates how quickly viewers become blind to banner ads that have a consistent placement on a page. The image below shows where the eyes focused on three consecutive email newsletters with a banner ad on the left of the page.

In the first mailing, almost 80% of the viewers scanned the ad, but that was cut in half by the second email and ended up at only 20% in the third. This shows how quickly “banner blindness” can happen. We are able to very quickly process what’s new and what’s familiar on a page, and we pass over the familiar. While this processing is bad for cases like the example above, it also points to opportunities for grabbing attention.

This is MarketingSherpa’s advice for combating banner blindness:
1. Change the landscape
The most powerful way to combat banner blindness is probably to vary the page template itself. By moving landmarks, you encourage the eye to conduct a more complete scan of the page. This is easiest in the e-mail world, where creating and scheduling similar, but not identical, templates won’t send the Web team into paroxysms.

2. Change the look and feel of ads
If you can’t change the position of ads, think about changing ad sizes or the way they look. In our study, for instance, we swapped in a text list where a graphical ad had been positioned and saw a jump in attention. The eye tracks changes to a familiar landscape.

3. Increase ad rotation
The easiest way to combat blindness is to change ads frequently. For publishers, that’s easy. That’s not the case with sponsored placements or in-house advertising; these can sit static for long periods.

It isn’t clear yet if video ads suffer the same fate, but my personal experience online tells me that we should take steps to change these up as often as possible too.