Banner Blindness
This is a guest post by Justin Brooke, author of SEO Lies: A Book About SEO Truths. Justin has helped everyone from home business start-ups to 9 figure earning CEO’s, so you can rest assured he’s got a wallet-fattening tip for you too.

Would you like to get thousands of highly targeted visitors to your website for just pennies each? Want to know my secret source from above? It’s FACEBOOK!
How do I get my ads to cost so little?
There are 5 important steps you must follow, but before I teach you those 5 steps there’s a really big obstacle you’ll have to over come – it’s called Banner Blindness.
You see, so many people are on Facebook for hours at a time and every single day sometimes.
They spend hours on end reading profiles, checking status updates, etc. They get so used to the Facebook layout that their eyes start to tune out the unnecessary content (ads they see repeatedly) and only focus on the main content.
Banner Blindness is where your readers are overlooking your ads because they have discredited the “ad” area as having no value, so you’ll need to make sure you constantly change up your ad image at least every other day. If not you’ll see your click thru rates plummet and your costs skyrocket.
Other than that follow these 5 best practices and you too can get traffic for pennies…
1. Call Out To The Target
Your first step is to call out to your target audience in the title. You’re going to call out to the people you want reading and clicking in your ads. The only way to get their attention is to call out to them specifically. For example, If you were targeting tomato growers you’d say, “Do You Grow Tomatoes?” If you targeted bloggers you’d say, “Are You A Blogger?”
Also, notice the question mark at the end of both those titles. That one character has ALWAYS improved my conversions across text link ads, to Google Adwords, to Facebook advertising – even email subject lines. One of the reasons this works so well is because it causes the reader to think more… Are you a tomato grower? Yes – I love growing tomatoes, etc.
2. Ugly images get noticed.
I see too many people trying to use the gorgeous traditional images or they want to look really professional so they have this guy in a suit and tie, but those ads just do not convert.
They are the most susceptible to banner blindness because they are normal, they are common, they are easy, but they don’t break up the vision pattern. Where as if you put in an image that is less common or “ugly” the eye is attracted to it because it is out of place.
Take these two ad pictures for example – Picture 1 is a common stock image that has nothing to really think about, but picture number 2 breaks up your vision. It’s not even an ad you really want to look at for too long, but it gets the point across right away and it gets thought about.
When you’re ads get thought about, your ads get clicked!
Picture #1![]() |
Picture #2![]() |
Another tip for creating “ugly” images to overcome banner blindness is to take a regular picture and turn it upside down or sideways. Just make the picture look wrong or all jacked up.
Also, make sure you’re rotating your images. If you’re using the same “ugly” image repeatedly you’re feeding the banner blindness – change it up every couple days so that your viewers don’t ad your images to the “normal and useless” category. Doing these 3 things with your images will get your ad noticed and help improve your click through rate.
3. Predict their near future.
Step 3 is an important tip for you to really learn and apply to get your description section to be most effective. It’s a concept I learned from Brad Fallon a while back – he said that you need to demonstrate the buyers experience.
You need to pretend the person has already bought your product and describe to them what they are going through. If you are selling a Tomato Growing Secrets ebook where you teach readers to grow giant tomatoes. You need to write your description in a way that shows the viewer what their life will be like after they buy.
Other marketers call this WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me.” Tell the ad reader what their life is like now (after they’ve bought the product). For example, Imagine you’ve grown the largest tomato and your friends are raving about it – click here to find out how. This technique really helps the conversion of my ads.
Here are a few ads I created that use the tips I’ve listed here to help you when building your ads.
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4. Target your dream visitor
In this section we’ve created the ad and are now ready to target who gets to see the ad on Facebook. In this step you need to think, “who is the perfect visitor to your website.”
If you were selling a mommy blogger workshop in Tampa, Florida. You could specifically target 35 year old women, in Tampa, Fl. who like blogging. You can even target that they are married so that there is more of a chance they have kids (not that you have to be married to have kids, but it’s more likely).
Be specific and ad in the interest of your audience. If they are bloggers, you’d type in blog, blogs, blogging, blogger etc. If it was for the tomato growing niche I’d type in growing tomatoes, gardening, and gardener.
5. Pay for the eyeballs and sell clicks
My final tip is to get you to pay per impression – DO NOT pay per click. Here’s a little example to explain why you should choose CPM over CPC.
CPC MODEL -> 1,000 views @ $0.50 cpc x 10 clicks = $5.00
CPM MODEL -> 1,000 views @ $0.50 cpm x 10 clicks = $0.50
Most marketers get scared and pay CPC to insure they get the clicks, because on CPM you can pay for impressions but never get a click. Even if I only get 5 clicks out of 1,000 views and I’m paying $0.50cpm that’s still 5 clicks for just $0.50.
Just need to start out slow and test different ads to see which ones get clicked. Then once you know what catches their eye you’ve got just about all the traffic you can shake a stick at coming your way for pennies!
Here’s a short video showing you how to setup your own campaign…
It’s been my pleasure to share this with you, if you have any questions post them as a comment below. I’ll hang around for the next couple days to answer them all. You can also just say hi or leave some feedback, either way let’s chit chat ok!

Tags: Advertising, Banner Blindness, Blog, Click-through rate, Facebook, Google, Pay per click.
Filed under Marketing Online by admin on Jul 27th, 2010.









