New study, banner blindness is getting worse
According to Jacob Nielsen’s latest study, banner blindness is apparently getting worse. And he says that unethical way of advertising gets better results than normal advertising. For example, study found that flashing banners with fake “close” and “OK” buttons got more clicks than normal banners. These are banners that mimic the system error notifications.
Heatmaps from eyetracking studies: The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements.
Solution: Ad blending
According to the study results, blending an ad to the content (and making it more like a part of content rather than ad) works better than displaying the ads as ads. I think everybody knows that by now already, because everybody is doing it in Google AdSense.
However it also suggests that blending it too much, might actually hurt your business in the long run.
A specific ad may or may not be ethical, depending on how closely it masquerades as content. I caution against going too far, because it can backfire and mislead users. Unethical ads will get you more fixations, but ethical business practices will attract more loyal customers in the long run.
The study also suggests that advertising through ad networks (e.g Google AdWords, TribalFusion..etc) is less effective than advertising directly on the desired website. Because the banners get less fixation (i.e less people will look at them because of the banner blindness) when advertised through ad networks.
I kind of agree with this, with ad networks it’s very easy to waste your money in a second and get no results. You can easily get few hundred times of banner impression but it’s possible that you get only a hand full of clicks. That said, you can read the full article at www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html
Related Posts
- ADSDAQ beta is open to all web publishers
- Free Online Banner Creator Tool
- Planning to start a new blog? What is your target market?
- Study: 33.3% of people write down their passwords
- WP Hack: Adding banner (ad) after the first post
By Average Joe Blogger on Aug 21, 2007
What’s also interesting, according to the screen shots, is that a significant number of readers don’t finish reading the post or only read (scan) the first few words of each line in the post.