Ad Blindness Banner Blindness – the website usability & ad placement study

The term Banner Blindness came in first when visitors to various websites subconsciously predicted the location of advertisements and banner and quite naturally ignored those portions of the websites. It is as if the advertising banner never really existed for the visitors! With the effect spreading over all ad types, the more commonly used term followed with Ad Blindness .

Refer to Google’s suggestion on how to make ads more effective by controlling their layouts, shapes and colors.

A more relevant article was published by Jakob Nielson of the Nielson Norman Group where he studied how visitors normally read web pages. Read the study here . Nielson points out that visitors usually scan the content until they find something interesting enough to stop and read in detail . His study demonstrates the various hot zones that receive the visitors maximum attention span. And from all other similar studies, it is almost safe to assume that the top 35% of your content is what either attracts the user or makes them move off to another. And advertising blindness subconsciously guides them away from all possible places where they would have to spend their valuable time looking at advertisements.

The technical groups have not stood still either. With studies like that of Nielson pointing out the various browsing patterns of users, they have constantly pushed user’s comfort zone by placing advertisements in unusual places, and by blending the advertisements with the content. More advanced technologies as used by Google, MSN and Yahoo tend to add an incremental value by displaying ads that are closely relevant to the content. This is also known as contextual advertising.

For blogs supported by WordPress for example, there are additional programs that will randomly place advertisements within your content. The position, shape and content will change every time your blog page is displayed. And Google , for example, allows you to create ads that has the same look and feel. And Google places ads that are extremely relevant to the content.

Technology & usability aside, this trend raises the ethical question of mixing up editorial content that your user values with a commercial advertisements. As Nielson pointed out its the publishers call to separate out ads (and hence cut down on advertising revenue) at the cost of retaining the trust of the readers. In my opinion, readers do understand the necessity of ads (which keeps information and tools free) but only to a certain extent. Too many ads, too many pop ups or too irrelevant ads could prevent even your dedicated readers from coming back as frequently as they want to.