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 col­or­ful­ly 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 favored instead. A further result was the re­al­iza­tion 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 recognize 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 dialog 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 behavior. 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.