We're All Going Blind!
Posted On: 2007-09-04
When was the last time you actually stopped and looked at any advertising on a web page that you were visiting? Perhaps the question I should have asked was when was the last time you actually noticed any advertising on a web page you were visiting but then the chances are that you couldn't have answered that question at all.
You see, we're all blind to much of the advertising that is around on the Net these days if it comes in the form of banners ... and I'm not just talking about the standard 460x60 banners either. Regardless of the shape or size we tend not to see them at all.
Now you might think that we're not seeing the advertising because, as professional webmasters, we spend so much time on the Net that we've developed the ability to filter out the advertising but others are still seeing those banners. Sadly, if you think that, then you're dead wrong; professional webmasters are not the only ones who aren't seeing the traditional form of advertising these days.
But banner blindness is nothing knew, we've known that it's been a problem for some years now and the good old days of making money by showing nothing but a banner farm have gone for ever. However, many of us still thought that there was some value in using banners as a form of advertising ... and maybe there is but these days any value is fast disappearing.
Some recent eye tracking studies by Jakob Nielsen have really brought home to marketers what we basically already knew but now we can see it in the form of heat maps and now it has become very scary because we're no longer talking just about banners.
In the latest tests Nielsen too three different groups and tracked their eyes as they looked at three different web pages. The pages were just your average everyday web page and they included informative text, navigation and some advertising. Some of the advertising was in the form of banners while other advertising looked more like text (but were still separated from the informative text on the web pages) and some of the advertising was inserted into the text in much the same way as Google suggests that you blend in some of their Adsense advertising.
The first group was asked to quickly scan a page; the second group was asked to partially read a page and the third group was required to thoroughly read the page. When the heat maps were compiled it showed that almost no one looked at the ads. A few did glance at the ads but didn't stay long enough to be able to recall anything they actually saw there.
One person actually did look at an ad long enough to see what was there ... and would have seen it too but a javascript drop-down navigation menu obscured what they had been looking at.
So perhaps all those hardcore banners and bright flashing text ads that you're putting up just aren't working and you're wasting your time by having them there.
Nielsen did suggest that all was not gloom and doom for online advertising. Other tests that he cited in his latest report have shown that advertising that comes in the form of text does get read and if you include a face or sexually attractive body parts your advertising will be seen but that's about it.
He also suggests that advertising that is truly blended into the text on a page ... perhaps where the entire text on a page is really part of the advertisement ... is likely to be far more effective than other forms of advertising. Even that has some important implications for us and if you want to take advantage of that form of advertising then you're really going to have to work at making it effective ... but it could be worth it.
Steve and I did a little experiment on one of our mainstream blogs last week and found that the click through rate to a sponsor was far greater when we used the Word Press sticky plug-in to keep a brief infomercial about one of our sponsors at the top of a local blog than it had been when we had displayed one of their banners in the same spot.
The next thing we want to test is to see if we can improve on that click through rate if the advertising looks less like an infomercial and more like a genuine article.
But what can adult webmasters take away from Nielsen's findings? Well there's more than just the obvious point that banners are not cutting it anymore. Obviously there's a need for many webmasters to rethink the way trying to sell their product because so much of our advertising - especially in galleries - is just not going to work anymore. But can we rework our galleries so that they will effectively market our product and still remain acceptable to TGPs who might send us traffic?
Can we rework our free sites so that they'll be more effective marketing tools and still remain within the guidelines set down by the Link Lists who we rely on for traffic? Do we even have the skills required to rework our galleries and free sites into effective marketing tools that don't look like marketing tools?
These are interesting challenges in interesting times and if you want to make money then you will need to address those challenges and produce advertising that surfers will want to stop and look at.