What is Ad Blindness?

Ad Blindness is an ability of the website’s visitors to ignore the ads displayed on a webpage they are reading.

Visitors who are ad blind mostly are webmasters, bloggers, tech savvy users, other online money maker and those users who frequently visit different websites. Most of the users who are ad blind tend to ignore advertisement just because they knew that those are advertisement and not natural links of your website. They simply don’t want to click ads because:

1. They are bloggers and webmasters who are also displaying those ads on their blogs and website. When they visit their own blogs or website, they tend to ignore the ads especially the Google Adsense ads because clicking them is against the Google Adsense policies. So, ignoring those ads at their own website or blog made them acquire the ability to ignore ads even if they are already at the websites or blogs of the other webmasters or bloggers.
2. Users who understand how advertisement works usually ignore ads on the website or blog they visit because they don’t want the owner of that certain website or blog earns money from his visit.
3. There are other users who became ad blind because of trauma they suffered after visiting a website which was being advertised. Maybe he was scammed. Or he might found useless thing on the ads he visited.
4. However, there are also ad blind users who tend to ignore the ads just because those are ads. They simply don’t want to visit any advertised website or product without any  reasons.

Reduce Ad Blindness

So, since you want to increase your Adsense income by simply increasing the CTR of Google Adsense, then you  need to try to reduce the Ad Blindness of your blog’s visitors. And here’s how:

1) Clean up your blog from Ad clutter.

Decrease the number of ad units displayed on your blog.

Some say that having a maximum number of Adsense ad units displayed on your blog increases the CTR of your Adsense. However, this is not always true because it sometimes lead to the ad blindness of your visitors.

Now, try displaying two Adsense units: 1 Adsense unit that will be displayed before the content and 1 after the content.

Then try stripping off those ads of the other network so that all the attention of your visitors will be focused to your content and to the Adsense ads.But if you think, you’re earning much not from Adsense but from other network, then don’t strip off those ads. Just take away those ads that convert less.

2) Blend the Adsense Ads to your content.

Configure the Adsense ads so that they will look like regular links of your blog. Blending Adsense ads into your content can be done by (1) changing the color or the text and the links of the adsense into the color of the content, and (2) changing the fonts of the content into the fonts used by Google Adsense.

It might be considered a deception, deceiving the visitors so that they couldn’t identify the ads. However, this kind of deception is acceptable according to the Adsense policies.

Read my article, “Blending Adsense and Blog Content“.

3) Adsense Placement.

Place the Adsense units in your blog’s section where it can blend much.

However, it would be better if your blog has the ability to place Adsense ad units differently in every webpages.

For example, in one webpage, the Adsense ad unit is placed at the middle of the content, then in another webpage, the Adsense ad unit is found almost at the bottom part of the content. But I am still wondering if there are plugins for Wordpress blogs available that can be used for this trick.

4) Entice visitors to read the ads.

I am not telling you here that you need to tell your visitors to visit or click the ads. We all know that it’s against to the TOS of every PPC ad network.

What I really mean is that do something in your Adsense ads so that it will attrack the visitors. For example, you can place a picture beside the ad unit. However, it is against the Adsense TOS if you’ll use a picture or photo which is not related to Adsense. So, to do this, just use the Adsense image ads and display it at the side of the Adsense text ads.

5) Make your ads more relevant.

And the most important thing is that your Adsense ads should be relevant so that the suggested steps above would become effective. Read my article, “Increase the Adsense Relevance” for some tips on how to increase the relevance of Adsense ads.

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