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Banner Blindness

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As more and more advertisers find more and more ways to promote their banner ads to web users the individual can’t help but respond with a single response: ignore ads. Indeed a user visiting a website is looking for information, he is looking for content. Traditionally one can find the ‘content’ (relevant text, photos) in the center column of the web page. The left side has the navigation, the middle has the content, and if there is a right side, it has ads, and so is ignored.

Extensive studies using ‘heat maps’ to follow user’s eye confirm this:
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/banner-blindness-old-and-new-findings/

How you can use this for your business

For those who don’t have banner ads all over their website there is still much to gain from this information. It applies to much more than web pages, in fact it applies to any printed medium, flyers and all.

Let’s extrapolate:

1)      Your most important content should be featured in the center content area, including any call-to-actions.

2)      Your call-to-actions should not be in the top header where it is competing for attention against other elements (photos etc)

3)      Since the eye is drawn to contrasting colors, use color and contrast wisely and don’t bombard the user with many of such elements. Keep it focused.

4)      Users scan pages, they don’t read them. Keep the content area readable. Don’t put huge chunks of uninterrupted text. Break them down into small paragraphs, each with a heading. Give the option for the user to click to read more if you have more content than snippets. Break large pages into smaller ones if you need to.

5)      Use descriptive and contrasting heading tags.

6)      Put call-to-actions at the bottom of the content area. The user is looking for the content, he will scan through, and read it, and get to the bottom of the page and then he has nothing to do. Unless you prompt him to do something he will leave. Therefore the bottom of the content area is very valuable real-estate.

7)      Page title/heading is key real-estate. It is the one thing on the page the user is sure to read. Therefore don’t devalue it by stuffing it with keywords. Instead, use marketing text, make it clear, catchy and compelling. It should convince him to keep reading.

Content Marketing

It is interesting to note that this data and these studies indicate that at least for the web, traditional advertising is becoming less effective and content marketing is taking its place. Therefore if from the outset one’s content was created and laid out with a precise content marketing strategy, you could then make your content work for you and drive business in.

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