What effect does banner blindness have on online marketing?

The first ad­vert­ising banner was placed on the website Wired.com in October 1994. The site belonged to the web magazine HotWired, a digital spin-off to Wired magazine, which still exists today. The client of this banner ad­vert­ise­ment was the tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions group, AT&T. In addition to the col­our­fully written question, 'Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE?', the ad also contained an arrow pointing to the prophetic answer 'YOU WILL', written in big white letters. There wasn’t a company logo present, but the 'YOU WILL' slogan also adorned the company’s TV campaign.

Ad­vert­ising banners should go towards be­ne­fit­ting both parties: AT&T was happy with the result since many website visitors responded pos­it­ively and clicked on the ad, and the magazine attracted a lot of attention with its in­nov­at­ive concept helping them make a con­sid­er­able profit within six months - thanks to ad­vert­ising revenue. The click-through rate (CTR) of this first web banner was a re­mark­able 44% meaning that out of 100 users that saw it, 44 clicked on it, which is a figure that marketers can only dream of today.

If you look at the stat­ist­ics from the Google Display Benchmark Tools, you will notice that only one or two users out of 1,000 actually click on online averts across the various website formats. There are many factors con­trib­ut­ing to this low number and one of them in a phe­nomen­on known as 'banner blind­ness' or 'ad blind­ness'.

Banner blindness is a phe­nomen­on that describes the act of site visitors con­sciously or un­con­sciously ignore ad­vert­ising banners or banner-like elements. The term was mainly coined in the work of Benway and Lane in 1998. They carried out a web usability study, in which test subjects had to search for specific in­form­a­tion on spe­cific­ally-pro­grammed sites in a private network. This in­form­a­tion could be easily found by clicking on relevant banners. Sometimes these banners resembled well-known ad­vert­ising banners and other times they looked very different. The ap­pear­ance did not matter to the test subjects since the ex­per­i­ment confirmed the as­sump­tions that the banners were mostly ignored and that text links were favoured instead. A further result was the real­isa­tion that banners placed at the top of the page were noticed less often compared to those po­si­tioned further down. Since this banner blindness study was carried out, this phe­nomen­on has increased con­sid­er­ably, proving the sharp decline in the number of click-through rates in display ad­vert­ising.

There are many causes and ex­plan­a­tions for the steady increase in banner blindness: the user’s internet-savvy brain is now trained to recognise that many website elements such as banners or large images and so on resemble ad­vert­ising. So they in­stinct­ively know it’s something they haven’t been de­lib­er­ately looking for. Un­con­sciously blanking out typical areas and elements is therefore a logical reaction. This is also confirmed by the fact that users who surf the web without a target in mind are more likely to click on ad­vert­ise­ments. Banner blindness has increased due to fake dialogue boxes es­pe­cially. Users were often shown error messages, prize con­firm­a­tions, or virus warnings disguised as the typical 'OK' and 'Cancel' buttons. When a user clicked on them, they were suddenly presented with ad­vert­ise­ments or their computer was infected with malware – a technique that is still used today and is one of the three most unpopular ad­vert­ising strategies alongside pop-ups and slow-loading ads. In the end, banner blindness is also the result of the strong sensory overload that visitors ex­per­i­ence when visiting a website. The TV and print ad industry has started focusing more on this topic, making the sub­con­scious per­cep­tion of ad­vert­ising an important research subject.

The problem of banner blindless isn’t just limited to ad­vert­ise­ments: web de­velopers are also now forced to deal with the phe­nomen­on. Since website users un­con­sciously decide which elements to notice and which to disregard, they sometimes end up blanking out content that isn’t an ad­vert­ise­ment at all. Large, banner-like images as well as ads in typical ad­vert­ising locations such as in the right column or in the header receive much less attention, in par­tic­u­lar. De­velopers on one hand have the task of avoiding these areas or filling them with less important content, and on the other hand they must be very careful regarding the shape and placement of images. If possible they should test how effective they are. The latter is easier said than done: there is the pos­sib­il­ity of carrying out A/B testing, which is when two different versions of a web project are presented to test subjects to find out which is the most effective and then the final version is rolled out. However, this type of test functions more as an eval­u­ation of the general usability of a website, not a blindness test per se. Just how pro­nounced banner blindness is, can, under certain cir­cum­stances, be evaluated. It can’t be proven with absolute certainty though, since it forms an essential part of user behaviour. For this reason, de­velopers should ask them­selves be­fore­hand which elements they consider to be ad-like or un­im­port­ant. In this way, they can eliminate potential stumbling blocks before the actual test phase and have a better view of po­ten­tially critical elements. Various eye-tracking studies conducted over the last few years have also helped during the de­vel­op­ment phase of building a site. Eye movement is recorded by tracking devices and then displayed virtually using heatmaps. This method has already been used mainly in neur­os­cience, lin­guist­ics, and product design. It has been put into practice by Jakob Nielsen (among others) in an extensive web usability study. The results that he presented in his 2009 work, 'Eyetrack­ing Web Us­ab­il­ity', confirmed the existence of the phe­nomen­on of banner blindness. Today, numerous providers such as EyeQuant offer an eye-tracking analysis of web projects by using software that gathers up sci­entif­ic data. Other tools such as Mouseflow generate heatmaps based on mouse movements.

While web de­velopers are able to deal with banner blindness, creative minds in the ad­vert­ising industry need to find new ways of com­mu­nic­at­ing their messages to internet users. In addition to banner blindness many users today also rely on ad blockers that stop banners and pop-ups from appearing since they are often perceived as annoying and un­trust­worthy. This doesn’t have any effect on the click-through rate because ads that have actually been displayed count towards that tally. For internet ad­vert­isers though, blocking tools are a serious problem.

And even if recent de­vel­op­ments aim to provide users with limited access to content when using one of these filters, the problem of banner blindness can only really be solved if ad­vert­isers come up with al­tern­at­ive, in­nov­at­ive ideas. One strategy developed in the US is known as native ad­vert­ising. The main idea of this concept is to integrate ad­vert­ising into the general content of a website or web ap­plic­a­tion without the user per­ceiv­ing it as such. To achieve this ads need to be as close as possible to the content type being used in the re­spect­ive text – whether that comes in the form of texts, blog posts, or videos.

Mobile devices appear to be helping online ad­vert­ising to revive and once again become a prof­it­able and growth-promoting factor for companies. If the phe­nomen­on of banner blindness is only slightly prevalent on smart­phones, tablets, etc., marketers have been forced to use creative ad­vert­ising banner al­tern­at­ives due to the small screen size. Pop-up ads are also somewhat more suc­cess­ful on mobile devices than on desktops, thanks to the inherent in­ac­cur­acy of using touch screens with your finger, etc.

Typical examples of native ad­vert­ising can be found in droves on social networks. Whether on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest: ad­vert­ise­ments appear auto­mat­ic­ally on the user’s timeline in the style of editorial articles (articles, images, videos, etc.) if the user’s digital profile has suggested they could be a potential customer. Meanwhile in­flu­en­cers such as athletes, actors, or models, actively par­ti­cip­ate in the ad­vert­ising process by casually present­ing brands or products in their posts. In order to combat users’ banner blindness, it is often necessary (in the case of marketing) to be creative and always be one step ahead of the consumer.