Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen just posted a fascinating new article about the latest empirical evidence for “banner blindness.” What’s that, you ask? It’s the tendency of people surfing the Web to unconsciously ignore anything that looks like an advertisement.
Nielsen’s proof is a fascinating new eye-tracking study he just completed. Such studies have people wear a device called an “eye tracker” and perform a common series of tasks, such as surfing the Web. The tracker then registers where a person’s eye focuses, and for how long.
One neat result of these studies is something called a “heatmap,” which uses temperature colors to depict where a person focused on a particular page. On Nielsen’s heatmaps, for instance:
- Red represents “where users looked the most”
- Yellow (getting cooler) “indicate[s] fewer views”
- Blue (cold) represents “the least-viewed … areas”
- Gray is “areas [that] didn't attract any fixations”
Guess what color banner ads were? That’s right: gray. To see the actual heatmaps, click through to the article and scroll down.
What does this mean for direct-response marketers? It should mean very little. That’s because anyone who tracks his or her marketing ROI should already know that banner ads – except at very cheap CPMs with plenty of make-goods – don't pay. The DR marketer's cost-per-order (CPO) metric alone can tell you many things that other marketers need fancy eye-tracking studies to accept.
Still, such studies are a helpful way to combat the persistent tendency of companies to drift away from scientifc marketing techniques toward unmeasurable schemes fiercely supported with logical-sounding arguments. Argument such as, “Well, even if our direct sales are terrible, we’re still generating awareness and that has to be paying off at retail.”
Kudos to Nielsen for helping to show that this is just what direct marketers have always suspected it was: wishful thinking.
