Are We Blind To Banner Ads?
Do expensive, flashy banner ads really work? Studies suggest advertisers attempting to draw traffic through banner ads could be wasting their time and their money.
Many advertisers are putting a great deal of money into the placement of “banner ads”, those ads that run across the top few inches of a web page. They are often animated and flashy, meant to draw the users' eye right to them, urging them to follow the ad link to their site. But do banner ads really draw the crowds they are expected to?Not according to a Rice University study done in 1998 by Jan Panero Benway and David M. Lane. Benway and Lane’s study was not specified to banner ads, but to any link made to stand out on a page. The idea is that if you have a particular link on your page that is especially important to your visitors to see, for example, the “Buy Now!” link on a sales page, you are naturally inclined to make it bigger and more eye-catching. In 1996 Detweiler and Omanson argued that "In general, the larger an item is, the greater its perceived visual importance and likelihood of attracting attention. Make sure that items of greatest importance are easy to see, and clearly distinguished from other items.” This hypothesis seems to make perfect sense, but Benway and Lane wanted to investigate the behavior of real users.
Testing the Existence of Banner BlindnessWhat they found may surprise you. They created a usability test in which the subjects were required to navigate from a home page to a smaller page located deeper in the site. The test subjects were asked to find information about Internet courses. Right there on the first page was a large ad that screamed “New! Internet Courses! Click Here for Information!” Yet surprisingly, most users scrolled right past this giant ad to a smaller link in the main menu towards the bottom of the page that said simply “Courses”. But once there, they realized they could not find the information they wanted. They had passed up the correc