Make Money from the Web:
Internet Advertising Effectiveness

Almost every site you encounter these days will have some kind of advertising or other on it (just as this one does). We all know that only one visitor in a hundred will actually click on the links supplied so we plaster our sites with more colourful or dynamic ads in the hope that the number of clicks (the so-called 'click-through' rate) will increase. In this respect I was blindly following the herd. Creating content, adding more pages to the site, attempting to get my page rank in Google increased whilst using other methods such as blogs, rss and web forums to drive traffic to my site. In effect I was relying on increased traffic to overcome the perceived limitation of the 1% click-through rate. Then I began doing some research about what's known as human–computer interaction (HCI). Basically the psychology behind how the people interact with web pages. What makes them pay attention to elements on a page and what the things they ignore. A number of the things I found out have bee applied to my website (and have doubled revenue without increasing the number of pages or drawing more traffic and on this page I'm going to share what I found out with you.

What you need to know:

So how do People Actually View Web Pages?

This could be considered as the crux of what we're trying to understand. After all, how many web designers or web authors have actually thought seriously about how users actually view their web pages. We're all so focussed on content that we can often entirely ignore our intended audience. Perhaps this is because we have a sneaky suspicion that we won't like the answer. In many ways such unconscious fears aren't unfounded as the studies undertaken in this area so far really don't make encouraging reading. However, if we don't know what people are actually doing when they're reading information on a website then we can't make our sites better to cater for how people actually do read them.

The first thing to recognise is the nature of the web itself. It is generally information rich but content poor. Most web surfers are internet savvy. They know that they may well have to visit several websites to glean the information they're looking for. As a result they tend not to examine a particular website in detail. Rather they 'graze' a particular site looking for specific keywords so that the particular information they're looking for can be sought-out.

Helping the User find What they Want

It's one of the paradoxes of the internet that you want to keep the user on your site as long as possible whilst the user simply wants to get at the nub of the information you're providing so that they can move on to the next site. This develops into a tug-of-war between the web designer and the user which may lead to the user becoming so fed-up with your site that they never visit it again. It may sound counter-intuitive but actually helping the user find what they want so that they can leave quickly may actually significantly improve return traffic to your site. If you arrange each web page with easy sub-titles and an obvious key to the main sections whilst providing easily navigable sitemaps and site search systems will make them feel comfortable on your site.

Human beings are basically the same as they were a thousand, two thousand, five thousand years ago. We are have all evolved to deal with other people on a personal level. We need to know other people so that we can grow to trust them. Providing easy and consistent navigation on your site helps this aspect of 'trust'. So that people believe you are trying to help them rather than trying to help yourself. Your site will, as a result, become an information resource that they will come back to again and again. This interaction with your visitor, gaining their trust and giving them reasons to come back to your site, is far more important than trying to trap them into your site on a single visit. This is why you should develop your own 'voice' on your site. Make it individual, use your own writing style so that your visitors know you and know you can be trusted. This way they will come to trust other aspects of your site, such as the advertising you're providing.

Banner Blindness and the Use of Banner Advertising

Even today the most common medium for advertising on the Web is through the use of banner advertisements. This form of advertisement often combines animation, sophisticated graphics, and even audio to endorse product information. The effectiveness of such advertising being generally measured in terms of the 'click through rate' which is the ratio of the number of times an ad appears on a page compared to the number of times an individual clicks on the banner. The problem is that banner ads are great for the retailer but poor for the website owner. Analyses by Ipsos-ASI research shows that an internet banner is effectively equivalent to a 30-second TV advertisement in increasing overall user awareness of a brand by as much as 40%. So, 2/5 of your visitors will remember a brand from a banner advertisement after they leave your site but only 1 in every 100 will actually click on the banner. Effectively, in the hope of gaining that 1% click-through you're actually proving the various companies you're affiliated with a lot of free advertising. Indeed, dollar for dollar the internet is by far the most cost-effective means of advertising for any company. But if you look at the figures it's not actually very good for you as a webmaster.

Banners can work; however, the research of Benway (Benway, J.P. (1998). Banner blindness: the irony of attention grabbing on the world wide web Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 42nd Annual Meeting, USA, 1, 463–467) demonstrated that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. When participants in this study were asked to find specific information on a web page, the information was not found if it was imbedded in a banner. It is as a result of this work by Benway that we have the term 'banner blindness'. Benway also found that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page (closer to other important links). This finding is supported by another study by Athenia Associates which showed a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1/3 of the way down the page.

How we look at Web Pages and Primate Cognition

Despite the fact that many people would like to dispute the fact, humans are great apes. We are close cousins of chimpanzees and gorillas and more distant cousins of the Orang utan. Our colour perception and our front-facing eyes giving us binocular vision are all part of our primate heritage. We evolved in colourful rainforests and colour vision is part of the background to our lives. The problem is that our vision is keyed to movement. This is why static colourful banners can be ignored easily, as they fade into the background of our visual surfing experience. This may explain why animated ads generally have a 15% higher click-through rate than static ads (as examined by ZDNet, 1996) and in some cases may have as much as a 40% higher rate. This is because motion against a colourful background speaks to the primate brain of danger; something we have to investigate to make sure it's not a threat.

In evolutionary terms humans came to writing very late (Homo sapiens as a species is 100000 years old and writing systems are, at most 5000 years old). Reading and writing doesn't come naturally to us, it's a learnt skill that's an effort to maintain (compare your attitude to spelling mistakes compared with mispronunciations if you don't believe me). Reading is an effort and we have to concentrate to do it. This is why recent investigations examining where an user's eyes track on a web page show that about 92% of the time is used-up in examining textual data as show in a Poynter Institute study of 2000.

Effective Selling with Text Advertisements

By looking at other websites you may have observed a recent trend for the placing of advertisements such as Google Adsense ads within the text of a website. The trend being to use text-based advertisements with the same colour scheme and fonts as used in the main body of the text. This way the reader of the web page actually reads the text of the advertisement (or at least scans it) in the same way that they scan the remainder of the text. This has proved very effective, and in using it on my own site I have seen an almost 8-fold increase in click-through revenue (yes, that's right 800%).

It is also an odd phenomenon in terms of human perception that we like things split into thirds. Photographers know this as the 'rule of thirds' and they've been using this aspect of human perception for over a century now. If placing a person in a landscape then the most pleasing way to do it is to have that person's head located a third of the way down from the top and a third of the way from the left or right hand sides of the image. Even if you're taking a purely landscape image you can make it more dramatic by placing a focal point somewhere within one of these thirds of the image. This is probably why advertisements placed somewhere within these thirds grids of a website are more effective than banners located elsewhere.

In this respect, the Google Adsense campaign is one of the best ways of 'monetizing' your website. You can select the layout, placement and the colour scheme of the adsense ads and Google themselves use a special spider to crawl your web pages to ensure that the content in the ads matches the contents of your site.

If you haven't already joined the adsense programme, simply click on the button above to get started. It's entirely free to join and you will gain advertisements for your site from a scheme that actually works.

Banner Advertisements, Should you Bother

Some recent studies Bayles, 2001 have compared the two banners shown below as to their effectiveness:

In the study named above, 70% of those who already knew about e-bay recalled the advertisement whilst only 37% of those unfamiliar with e-bay recalled the ad. In contrast, only 28% of those familiar with amazon recalled the ad whilst 29% of those unfamiliar with amazon recalled the ad. This disparity may be in the relative simplicity and high contrast of the ebay advertisement. In effect this ad is behaving like pure text, so that it holds the viewer's attention for longer. The amazon ad has far less contrast and is more colourful so that it can far more easily be seen as a background colour blur that's easily ignored.

Effective banners can therefore work but you will have to pay more careful attention to the placement of these banners. Simply placing banners across the top of your page will not work. They are probably going to be more effective inset somewhere into the text. Also, the banners you're serving will need to be relevant to the various visitors to your site. In effect all the visitors are coming to your site to search for specific information and if you give them relevant content and advertisements that specifically target that content your click-through rates will increase.

The other reason to persevere with banner advertisements is that they pay more for each and every click than any other form of advertising. The more people you can get clicking through and buying products the more income you will generate.

Conclusion

In conclusion, knowing something about human evolution and human psychology can lead us to make more effective use of advertisements on our sites. Placement can be predicted using the rules of what humans find pleasant in an image and text built naturally into a web page can be far more effective than either banners or left and right navigation at attracting clicks. There is also site design itself. Make your web pages useful and easily navigable and you will find that far more people visit your pages more often. In the end, however, the adage 'Content is King' remains a truism. No-one will visit your website if it doesn't have something new to say or doesn't provide a new slant on the sum of human knowledge. To paraphrase John Donne: no website is an island and this is the central adage on the internet. After all it's a web of content and your site should link out to other sites as well as linking internally to itself.

The only real answer is to diversify. Serve both banner advertisement and adsense advertisements on the same page. Go for the banner advertisements with animation and with high contrast. Place them in your text if you can. Certainly place the adsense advertisements in your text and make them look as similar to the overall 'look and feel' of your site as you can. This way you too can significantly improve your monthly income.