Why Smart Advertisers Are Diversifying Into Alternative Ad Formats to Beat Banner Blindness

Ignoring banners is a common problem, however, it has become a more serious issue than many media buyers realize. If you notice that your display ads have stagnated with spiking customer acquisition costs, it’s likely that the available inventory isn’t the issue but the ad format itself.

What your audience’s brain is doing to your banners

The human brain is really good at recognizing patterns – and that’s the problem with advertising. Web users have become quite adept at recognizing ads, and they automatically discard any information that seems ad-like. They don’t consciously think, “I shall now ignore any 728×90 leaderboards I see,” it just happens. This is your brain using selective attention mode. It knows you’re looking for content to read or watch, so it gives that a high priority and discards anything it decides is peripheral information that doesn’t serve its perceived immediate goal.

Standard ad sizes are often placed at the top, the right sidebar, and/or in-between content blocks on a webpage. This makes them visual references your brain will specifically overlook when scanning a webpage for what it has decided is the content you’re looking for.

The real cost of staying in saturated display channels

When click-through rates decrease, many advertisers feel the best approach is to bid more in order to keep the same level of impressions. However, entering a bidding war in a saturated display environment causes the cost to influence those users that are left to rise. Also, the return on your ad investment will decrease during each campaign.

This feeling is reinforced by ad fatigue. If an increasingly smaller group of people is repeatedly exposed to your banner, the possibilities that it will have a positive impact not only stop increasing, it actually decreases. The effect of repeated exposures depletes the performance of a display campaign at a faster rate than other types of advertising.

With margins becoming tighter, the user cost to acquire increases, ROAS decreases, and since costs are based on impressions, essentially you are paying for ads that are never viewed. A broken strategy will not bring positive returns no matter how many resources you heap on it.

Why the solution isn’t about louder creative

The natural urge to combat banner blindness by making designs more prominent with larger fonts, animated elements, and higher contrast often leads to the opposite of the desired effect. Even in cases where people do notice overly aggressive ads, they are unlikely to seek those products out more enthusiastically. They install ad blockers instead.

Studies show that the main reason users adopt ad blockers is in response to ads that interfere with the browsing experience. These include autoplay video ads, interstitial ads, and ads that unfurl and stick to the viewport as you scroll down the page. In other words, these ad formats claim user attention by simply taking it, and users respond by revoking that attention entirely. No design refresh can solve that problem.

Alternative formats that respect user flow

Non-disruptive alternative formats operate according to a simple but important logic: rather than disturbing a user mid-session, they let natural curiosity and idle browsing lead them to you. One good example is popunder ads, which launch in a new browser window behind the tab the user is reading right now – and completely out of sight until they later close or minimize that window. This means that popunders reach the right eyes at the exact right moment: when a user is already planning to move on.

Think of it like a TV commercial during a popular show. Most people won’t leave the room to watch it, but those who do are actively seeking information. The same is true with popunders: only the most engaged users will click on an ad that appeals to them – your landing page – and seek to learn more. Others will just move on to the next tab or close their browser in search of news, content, or utility. They were leaving the room anyway.

For the best kind of user – the ready-to-leave room kind – nothing beats a format that lets them choose to enter.

Choosing the right advertising network for diversified formats

Not every ad network will let you buy alternative formats, and if they do, it won’t come with controls over human-quality traffic. Most programmatic display networks use the same banner inventory you’re competing with elsewhere. Tacking alternative formats on doesn’t change the fact that you’re still buying more of what’s failed to make an impact.

And if those failed banners run the typical programmatic round-robin before showing up in your campaign – passed from a network to an exchange to another network to a DSP, all in the fraction of a second it takes a webpage to load – you’re not only buying proven banner failure. You’re buying proven banner failure and a portion of bot traffic and domain spoofing to go with it, neither of which is going to help your poorly performing banner ads work any better.

So if you’re looking for new ways to get noticed and break through banner blindness, you need to vet both the formats and the traffic. A network that can provide more unique creative canvases and direct relationships with publishers is going to give you a leg up on both.

Frequency capping as a conversion lever

Frequency capping is a control that lets you regulate how many times a single user sees a particular ad within a set timeframe. For example, if you set a frequency cap of 4 in 24 hours, the same user would see the ad no more than 4 times in one day. This control is widely used in banner and other methods of traditional display advertising.

It’s an important lever for alternative format campaigns given the somewhat finite population you’re trying to reach and the fact that it’s push advertising. Too few impressions per user, and you may simply fail to generate enough interest. Too many per user, and they start to perceive your ad as intrusive rather than a gentle reminder of a brand or promotion they were already interested in.

Testing framework for full-screen alternative placements

Since alternative formats deliver your landing page at full screen with no adjacent content, the landing page itself is the one and only factor that performs. Weak copy, slow load times, or a call-to-action that doesn’t match the user’s intent can be immediately spotted. This is where CRO work can improve the business of giving you an extra few valuable seconds to convert.

A structured A/B testing approach for these placements should isolate a few specific variables. Load speed is the first one – a page that takes more than two or three seconds to become usable loses a significant share of users before they’ve read a single word. Test stripped-down landing pages against fuller versions. Often the simpler one loads faster and converts better.

Headline copy is the second variable worth systematic testing. The user has no context about how they arrived at your page, so the headline needs to establish relevance immediately. Test benefit-led headlines against curiosity-led ones. Test shorter against longer. Test different offer framings for the same product.

The call-to-action deserves its own round of testing separately from everything else. Button placement, language, contrast, and what happens after the click all affect completion rates. Don’t bundle CTA changes with other page changes or you’ll lose the signal. Keep test cycles short – two weeks is usually enough to get directional data with reasonable traffic volumes – and prioritize the variables with the largest potential lift first.

Building a multi-channel strategy around the funnel

Alternative formats are most successful not operating in a silo. The strongest media buyers rather utilize them as an additional layer. Not a direct replacement for search or social campaigns.

Search captures high intent users – they’ve already told you what they want by typing it into a search bar. Social gets you granular targeting by interest and behavior. Alternative formats get you users at scale across thousands of publishers none of whom you’re sharing a direct competitor with at prices far more advantageous than where you’d be bidding against every other company in your vertical.

How you apply this concept is through funnel mapping. Use search to capture high-intent users who are in the process of making a buying decision. Use social for users who have already expressed interest. Use alt format to get top-of-funnel awareness and volume. Constantly feed the top of that funnel so your retargeting pools don’t dry up and you don’t pay too much to acquire users via one channel once the other becomes too expensive.

But a user that sees your brand for the first time on an alternative format and then later a social retargeting ad is further than would be the case if they had seen each ad in isolation of the other. They reinforce each other. That’s the idea behind multi-channel diversification – not just spreading risk across channels, but spreading touchpoints out in a way that slowly pulls users down the purchase funnel.

The format problem is fixable

Banner blindness exists, it is a severe problem, and it will become increasingly costly for those who continue to rely on traditional IAB display inventory for their performance marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, the problem will not go away because the cause is psychological and cannot be reversed.

The only solution is to switch to ad formats that hit the clutter-free areas of a web page, seamlessly fit the user’s natural behavior, and guarantee viewability at the exact moment the user is engaging with the ad. Together with low frequency capping, granular landing page testing, and access to direct traffic, alternative ad formats can provide media buyers with a realistic way to escape from the diminishing returns of performance marketing without sacrificing the performance goal or the high-converting audience.

Photo by John on Unsplash