Banner Blindness
People stop seeing anything that looks like an ad or a thing they have seen before.
What it is
Repeated exposure to promotional shapes teaches people to skip them. Anything in the top-right rectangle, anything in a coloured box, anything that arrives as a pop-up, gets filtered before it is read. The same happens inside your own product when a message is shown too often.
The research
Users rarely fixated on page elements that resembled advertisements, even when those elements contained the information they were searching for.
Benway and Lane, 1998
How to use it
Put the offer in the content
A line of copy inside the article outperforms a banner beside it.
Cap the frequency
Show a prompt once, then wait. A message shown every session becomes wallpaper by the third.
Change the shape
If you must promote, avoid the standard ad sizes and positions people have learned to skip.
Related
Sources that shaped this entry: growth.design.