Type. Click. Look. Drawing in web visitors is its own game, but once you have them hooked, how do you get them to navigate to your ads? Jakob Nielsen says he has the answers. But he reveals them with one caveat in mind: they pose ethical dilemmas. Why? One of the three is a well-known “shady” advertising practice, the second likely won’t give a sense of what exactly you’re advertising, and the third is completely out of the question (at least for most media).
So what are the top three design elements that draw in the most eyes (based on eye tracking studies):
- Plain Text
- Faces
- Cleavage and “Private” Body Parts
There is one real fact in the eye tracking studies from which Nielsen draws: Banner blindness is real. Consumers have become accustomed to completely ignoring banners, and they’re getting more and more accustomed to it as the Internet grows older.
Of course, one way to avoid the pitfall of creating banners is to make the ads look like content, but this also poses its own ethical dilemma — news publishers have always held high the notion of separating the figurative “church” and “state” of ads and editorial. In the web world, this tenet may not last for long considering its effectiveness in raising the click-through-rate of ads.
Banner Ads on Brick image copyright Jonathan Haeber
