After I made this video I ran into a brand new case of banner blindness you definitely need to know about. Read through my new book to see my recent experiment with mobile banner blindness.
Banner Blindess and It’s Effect on Conversion Rate
Are you using a banner on your website or landing page to convey important information that you wouldn’t want your visitor to miss? Something like “10% off your first order” or “sign up for a newsletter”.
If you are then I would highly suggest including this information elsewhere in the visitor’s conversion flow. Why? It’s something called “Banner Blindness”.
We’ve been conditioned to simply ignore banners or anything that looks like a banner. From all the years of ads, we’ve seen them so frequently that it’s just a filter that our minds have applied.
This happens when you put the banner bar close to the top of page, but it also happens if you’re reading through some content and you see something that looks like it might be an ad. Your mind just straight up filters it out.
I recently ran a test where we took information that was within the banner and I duplicated that information just beneath the buy button. I saw a pretty solid increase in conversion rate during that test.
Bottom line, people are missing that information at the top of the page. Don’t assume that, just because you’re putting at the top of the page, that they’re going to see it. There are other factors at work here.
Mobile Banner Blindness
Recently I ran into a new (to me) issue with banner blindness. We have become blind to mobile banners at the bottom of our screen. Maybe you’ve seen these? They are sticky, they hover right at the bottom of the screen near your thumb in hopes that you click on them. I designed a solution that put a legitimate button there (i.e. not an ad). I even made it pulse so the visitor would notice it. A few years ago this would have worked great. It still works in apps (think Gmail’s app). But in this instance, people completely missed it! Their minds were filtering it out.
The usability test I ran on it made it even more interesting. The more tech savvy the user, the less likely they were to notice the button. My users who did not shop online and didn’t often browse the web using an app noticed the button immediately. My users who were always on their phone completely missed it, even after I added a “pulse” to it to really jog attention.
If you don’t know about user interface design, movement is like a nuclear option. If something moves, the user is almost guaranteed to look at it. It’s so strong, that I can’t keep tabs that have chat bots like Drift that flash “(1) Message” at me because I can’t concentrate, even if I’m looking at my other monitor. Humans have been conditioned by evolution to pay attention to movement. The fact that I added motion to a large, contrasting button and people still were blind to it is a serious concern to take into account.
