Banner blindness

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The front page of an internet forum with several orange banner messages attempting to catch the user's attention Old FOTP homepage (cropped).png
The front page of an internet forum with several orange banner messages attempting to catch the user's attention
Standard web banner ad sizes circa 2009 Standard web banner ad sizes.svg
Standard web banner ad sizes circa 2009

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information. A broader term covering all forms of advertising is ad blindness, and the mass of banners that people ignore is called banner noise.

Contents

The term banner blindness was coined in 1998 [1] as a result of website usability tests where a majority of the test subjects either consciously or unconsciously ignored information that was presented in banners. The information that was overlooked included both external advertisement banners and internal navigational banners, often called "quick links".

This does not, however, mean that banner ads do not influence viewers. Website viewers may not be consciously aware of an ad, but it does have an unconscious influence on their behavior. [2] A banner's content affects both businesses and visitors of the site. [3] Native advertising and social media are used to avoid banner blindness.

Factors

Human behavior

User goals

When searching for specific information on a website, users focus only on the parts of the page where they expect that information will be, e.g. small text and hyperlinks. [4] A 2011 study investigated via eye-tracking analysis whether users avoided looking at ads inserted on a non-search website, and whether they retained ad content in memory. The study found that most participants fixated (looked at) ads at least once during their website visit. [5] When a viewer is working on a task, ads may cause a disturbance, eventually leading to ad avoidance. If a user wants to find something on the web page and ads disrupt or delay their search, they will try to avoid the source of interference. [6]

Clutter aversion

A higher than expected number of advertisements may cause a user to view the page as cluttered. [7] The number of adverts and annoyances on a webpage contribute to this perception of clutter. [6] As users can concentrate on only one stimulus at a time, having too many objects in their field of vision causes them to lose focus. [8] This contributes to behaviors such as ad avoidance or banner blindness.

Website familiarity

As a user becomes familiar with a webpage, they learn where to expect content, and where to expect adverts, and learn to ignore banner ads without looking at them. [6] Usability tests that compared the perception of banners between subjects searching for specific information and subjects aimlessly browsing seem to support this theory. [4] A 2014 eye-tracking study examined how right-side images (in contrast to plain text) in Google AdWords affect users' visual behavior. The analysis concludes that the appearance of images does not change user interaction with ads. [9]

Brand recognition

If a user is already aware of a brand, viewing an ad banner for that brand would reconfirm their existing attitudes towards it, whether positive or negative. A banner ad may only leave a positive impression in the viewer if they already have a positive perception of the brand. Similarly, someone seeing an ad for a brand they have a negative perception of may further dissuade them from buying from that brand.

If viewers have a neutral or no opinion about a brand, then a banner ad for that brand could leave a positive impression, due to the mere-exposure effect: A tendency to develop a preference for something due to familiarity. [10]

Shared space

Unlike advertisements in television or radio, which completely interrupt and temporarily replace the content, banner adverts exist alongside the content. Websites typically contain various elements in different sizes, shapes, and colours. As a banner ad only occupies part of a website, it cannot hold the user's complete attention. [6]

Perceived usefulness

Banner ads that seem to contain useful information, and which are easy for the viewer to comprehend, are more likely to be viewed and clicked on than adverts the user does not find useful, or finds difficult to understand. [11]

Prices and promotions, when mentioned in banner ads, do not have a major impact on their perceived usefulness. Users assume that all ads signify promotions of some sort and hence do not give much weight to it. [11]

Congruence

Congruity is the relationship of an advert with the surrounding web content. There have been mixed results of congruity on users. Click through rates increased when the ads shown on a website were similar to the products or services of that website. A banner with colour schemes incongruent with the rest of website does grab the viewer's attention, but they tend to respond negatively to it, compared with banners whose color schemes were congruent. [12]

Congruency has more impact when the user browses fewer web pages. When users were given specific web tasks in a 2013 study, incongruent ads grabbed their attention, but they displayed ad avoidance behaviors. [13] The relevance of the ad's content to the user's goal and to the website does not affect view time due to the expectation that an advert will be irrelevant. [14]

Congruency between the advert and the web content has no effect on view duration, according to a 2011 study. [15]

Calls to action

Banners with phrases that invite action, such as "click here", do not attract views or clicks. [16]

Prevention and subversion

Advertisers and webmasters may attempt to prevent or subvert banner blindness by eliminating one or more possible causes:

Location

Users generally read webpage from top left to bottom right, so adverts in this path may be more noticeable. As viewers are less likely to notice something in their peripheral vision, adverts to the right of the page content will be seen less than adverts to the left. Banner ads just below the navigation area may be viewed more, as users expect content at the top of the page. Confusion about whether the top of page has content or advertisement results in more views of the advert. [16]

Animation

Users dislike animated ads since they can cause loss of focus. This distraction may increase the attention of some users when they are involved in free browsing (not seeking to complete a specific goal). Users involved in a specific task typically fail to recall animated ads, take longer to complete their task, and experience an increased perceived workload. [16] Moderate animation can increase recognition rates. Rapidly animated banner ads can cause lower recognition rates of the advert itself, and negative attitudes toward the advertiser. [17]

In visual search tasks, animated ads did not impact the performance of users and did not capture more views than static ads. [18] Animations signal to users of the existence of ads and lead to ad avoidance behavior, but repetitive exposure to them can induce the mere exposure effect. [19]

Personalization and relevance

Personalized ads use and include information about viewers, like demographics, PII, and purchasing habits. An ad is noticed more if it has a higher degree of personalization, even if it causes discomfort in users. Personalized ads are found to be clicked more often than other ads. If a user is involved in a demanding task, more attention is paid to a personalized ad than an unpersonalised ad. [20] [21]

Such ads do, however, increase privacy concerns and can appear 'creepy'. An individual with greater existing privacy concerns will avoid personalised ads, primarily due to concerns over their data being shared with third parties. Users are more likely to accept behavior tracking if they have faith in the company that permitted the ad. Though this can be an effective method for advertisers, users do not always prefer their behaviors be used to personalize ads. Ads are more often clicked when they show something relevant to the user's search but if the purchase has been made, and the ad continues to appear, it causes frustration. [20] [21]

Personalization enhanced recognition for the content of banners while the effect on attention was weaker and less significant, in the studies conducted by Koster et al. Exploration of web pages and recognition of task-relevant information was not influenced. Visual exploration of banners typically proceeds from the picture to the logo and finally to the slogan. [22]

If a website serves ads unrelated to its viewers' interests, about 75% of viewers experience frustration with the website. [23] Advertising efforts must focus on the user's current intention and interest and not just previous searches. Publishing fewer, but more relative, ads is more effective.

Advertisers may use data analytics and campaign management tools to categorise viewers and serve ads that are more likely to be relevant to the user's interests. Information about users could be gained through gamification tools which could reward them for providing that information. Such tools could be quizzes, calculators, chats, or questionnaires.

Native ads

Native advertising often places adverts inline with expected, non-ad content. For example, video advertisements playing within a video-streaming website before, during, or after the main video feature. Another common format is a text or image advert within a social media feed, formatted to resemble posts made by users.

Native ads are designed to resemble the user's expected experience. They can have greater viewability than other forms of advertising because they are less easy to distinguish from expected, non-advert content. [24]

Social media

Through social media, advertisers can transfer feelings of trust in known individuals to adverts, thereby validating the ads. Peer pressure can encourage users to change attitudes or behavior regarding advertising to adapt to group customs. [25] Advertisement through known people piqued interests of users and increased ad views much more effectively than banner ads.

See also

Related Research Articles

A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser. In many cases, banners are delivered by a central ad server. This payback system is often how the content provider is able to pay for the Internet access to supply the content in the first place. Usually though, advertisers use ad networks to serve their advertisements, resulting in a revshare system and higher quality ad placement.

Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies use data analysis and digital technology to show adverts to individuals based on their perceived characteristics and interests. Marketers use methods from data collection, analytics, digital electronics, and digital economics then use technology to analyze it and show personalized ads based on algorithms that attempt to deduce people’s interests.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pop-up ad</span> Form of online advertising

Pop-up ads or pop-ups are forms of online advertising on the World Wide Web. A pop-up is a graphical user interface (GUI) display area, usually a small window, that suddenly appears in the foreground of the visual interface. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript that uses cross-site scripting (XSS), sometimes with a secondary payload that uses Adobe Flash. They can also be generated by other vulnerabilities/security holes in browser security.

Digital display advertising is online graphic advertising through banners, text, images, video, and audio. The main purpose of digital display advertising is to post company ads on third-party websites. A display ad is usually interactive, which allows brands and advertisers to engage deeper with the users. A display ad can also be a companion ad for a non-clickable video ad.

Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google. They can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering. In Q1 2014, Google earned US$3.4 billion, or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense. In 2021, more than 38 million websites used AdSense. It is a participant in the AdChoices program, so AdSense ads typically include the triangle-shaped AdChoices icon. This program also operates on HTTP cookies.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.

An online advertising network or ad network is a company that connects advertisers to websites that want to host advertisements. The key function of an ad network is an aggregation of ad supply from publishers and matching it with the advertiser's demand. The phrase "ad network" by itself is media-neutral in the sense that there can be a "Television Ad Network" or a "Print Ad Network", but is increasingly used to mean "online ad network" as the effect of aggregation of publisher ad space and sale to advertisers is most commonly seen in the online space. The fundamental difference between traditional media ad networks and online ad networks is that online ad networks use a central ad server to deliver advertisements to consumers, which enables targeting, tracking and reporting of impressions in ways not possible with analog media alternatives.

Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.

In marketing, promotion refers to any type of marketing communication used to inform target audiences of the relative merits of a product, service, brand or issue, persuasively. It helps marketers to create a distinctive place in customers' mind, it can be either a cognitive or emotional route. The aim of promotion is to increase brand awareness, create interest, generate sales or create brand loyalty. It is one of the basic elements of the market mix, which includes the four Ps, i.e., product, price, place, and promotion.

Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks on a specific link to the number of times a page, email, or advertisement is shown. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website, as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns.

Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other digital platforms, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. Contextual targeting involves the use of linguistic factors to control the placement of advertising material. The advertisements are selected and delivered by automated systems, taking into consideration the context of a user's search or browsing behaviour. As advertisers and marketers increasingly prioritise brand safety and suitability, contextual advertising has emerged as a crucial aspect in safeguarding the reputation and value of a brand.

In Internet marketing, search advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search-engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other published content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital marketing</span> Marketing of products or services using digital technologies or digital tools

Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. It has significantly transformed the way brands and businesses utilize technology for marketing since the 1990s and 2000s. As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life, and as people increasingly used digital devices instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e-books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones, callbacks, and on-hold mobile ringtones. The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online marketing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geotargeting</span> Website content based on a visitors location

In geomarketing and internet marketing, geotargeting is the method of delivering different content to visitors based on their geolocation. This includes country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP, or other criteria. A common usage of geotargeting is found in online advertising, as well as internet television with sites such as iPlayer and Hulu. In these circumstances, content is often restricted to users geolocated in specific countries; this approach serves as a means of implementing digital rights management. Use of proxy servers and virtual private networks may give a false location.

Website monetization is the process of converting existing traffic being sent to a particular website into revenue. The most popular ways of monetizing a website are by implementing pay per click (PPC) and cost per impression (CPI/CPM) advertising. Various ad networks facilitate a webmaster in placing advertisements on pages of the website to benefit from the traffic the site is experiencing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Targeted advertising</span> Form of advertising

Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.

Behavioral retargeting is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is targeted to consumers based on their previous internet behaviour. Retargeting tags online users by including a pixel within the target webpage or email, which sets a cookie in the user's browser. Once the cookie is set, the advertiser is able to show ads to that user elsewhere on the internet via an ad exchange.

In the online advertising industry, a viewable impression is a measure of whether a given advert was actually seen by a human being, as opposed to being out of view or served as the result of automated activity. The viewable impression guidelines are administered by the Media Rating Council and require that a minimum of 50% of the pixels in the advertisement were in an in-focus tab on the viewable space of the browser page for at least one continuous second.

Site retargeting is a display advertising technique used by marketers to display advertising to people who have previously visited their website. The marketer includes a pixel within their webpage which sets a cookie in the user's browser. That cookie allows the marketer to target the website visitor with advertising elsewhere on the internet using retargeting.

Click tracking is when user click behavior or user navigational behavior is collected in order to derive insights and fingerprint users. Click behavior is commonly tracked using server logs which encompass click paths and clicked URLs. This log is often presented in a standard format including information like the hostname, date, and username. However, as technology develops, new software allows for in depth analysis of user click behavior using hypervideo tools. Given that the internet can be considered a risky environment, research strives to understand why users click certain links and not others. Research has also been conducted to explore the user experience of privacy with making user personal identification information individually anonymized and improving how data collection consent forms are written and structured.

References

  1. ↑ Benway, J. P.; Lane, D. M. (1998). "Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss 'Obvious' Links" (PDF). Internet Technical Group, Rice University. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  2. ↑ Lee, J., & Ahn, J. H. (2012). Attention to banner ads and their effectiveness: An eye-tracking approach. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 17(1), 119-137.
  3. ↑ Lapa, C. (2007). Using eye tracking to understand banner blindness and improve website design.
  4. 1 2 Pagendarm, M.; Schaumburg, H. (2001). "Why Are Users Banner-Blind? The Impact of Navigation Style on the Perception of Web Banners". Journal of Digital Information. 2 (1).
  5. ↑ Hervet, G.; Guerard, K.; Tremblay, S.; Chtourou, M. S. (2011). "Is Banner Blindness Genuine? Eye Tracking Internet Text Advertising". Applied Cognitive Psychology. 25 (5): 708–716. doi:10.1002/acp.1742.
  6. 1 2 3 4 [null Drèze, X., & Hussherr, F. X. (2003). Internet advertising: Is anybody watching?. Journal of interactive marketing, 17(4), 8-23.]
  7. ↑ Cho, C. H., & as-, U. O. T. A. A. I. A. (2004). Why do people avoid advertising on the internet?. Journal of advertising, 33(4), 89-97.
  8. ↑ Djamasbi, S., Hall-Phillips, A., & Yang, R. R. (2013). An Examination of Ads and Viewing Behavior: An Eye Tracking Study on Desktop and Mobile Devices.
  9. ↑ Ortiz-Chaves, L.; et al. (2014). "AdWords, images, and banner blindness: an eye-tracking study". El Profesional de la Información. 23 (3): 279–287. doi:10.3145/epi.2014.may.08.
  10. ↑ Kindermann, H. (2016, July). A Short-Term Twofold Impact on Banner Ads. In International Conference on HCI in Business, Government and Organizations(pp. 417-426). Springer International Publishing.
  11. 1 2 Idemudia, E. C., & Jones, D. R. (2015). An empirical investigation of online banner ads in online market places: the cognitive factors that influence intention to click. International Journal of Information Systems and Management, 1(3), 264-293.
  12. ↑ Robinson, H., Wysocka, A., & Hand, C. (2007). Internet advertising effectiveness: the effect of design on click-through rates for banner ads.International Journal of Advertising, 26(4), 527-541.
  13. ↑ Porta, M., Ravarelli, A., & Spaghi, F. (2013). Online newspapers and ad banners: an eye-tracking study on the effects of congruity. Online Information Review, 37(3), 405-423.
  14. ↑ Higgins, E., Leinenger, M., & Rayner, K. (2014). Eye movements when viewing advertisements. Frontiers in Psychology, 5.
  15. ↑ Hervet, G., Guérard, K., Tremblay, S., & Chtourou, M. S. (2011). Is banner blindness genuine? Eye tracking internet text advertising. Applied cognitive psychology, 25(5), 708-716.
  16. 1 2 3 Resnick, M., & Albert, W. (2014). The impact of advertising location and user task on the emergence of banner ad blindness: An eye-tracking study. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 30(3), 206-219.
  17. ↑ Goldstein, D. G., Suri, S., McAfee, R. P., Ekstrand-Abueg, M., & Diaz, F. (2014). The economic and cognitive costs of annoying display advertisements. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(6), 742-752.
  18. ↑ Jay, C., Brown, A., & Harper, S. (2013). Predicting whether users view dynamic content on the world wide web. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 20(2), 9.
  19. ↑ Lee, J.; Ahn, J. H.; Park, B. (2015). "The effect of repetition in Internet banner ads and the moderating role of animation". Computers in Human Behavior. 46: 202–209. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.01.008
  20. 1 2 O'Donnell, Katie; Cramer, Henriette (May 2015). "People's Perceptions of Personalized Ads". WWW '15 Companion. International Conference on World Wide Web. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1293–1298. doi:10.1145/2740908.2742003.
  21. 1 2 Bang, H., & Wojdynski, B. W. (2016). Tracking users' visual attention and responses to personalized advertising based on task cognitive demand.Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 867-876.
  22. ↑ Koster, M.; Ruth, M.; Hambork, K. C.; Kaspar, K. C. (2015). "Effects of Personalized Banner Ads on Visual Attention and Recognition Memory". Applied Cognitive Psychology. 29 (2): 181–192. doi:10.1002/acp.3080.
  23. ↑ "Online Consumers Fed Up with Irrelevant Content on Favorite Websites, According to Janrain Study | Janrain". Janrain. Retrieved 2016-11-07.
  24. ↑ "Banner Blindness, Viewability, Ad Blockers and Other Ad Optimization Tricks". Business 2 Community. Retrieved 2016-11-07.
  25. ↑ Margarida Barreto, A. (2013). Do users look at banner ads on Facebook?. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 7(2), 119-139.
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