Online Advertising and User Experience
Internet disrupted advertising industry the most among all industries. Online advertising has both strong proponents-the marketers, the entrepreneurs and the evangelists—and opponents, those who resent being marketed to and hate ads. While advertisers want to move closer to their goals, end-users resist the drop in the quality of their experience. Entrepreneurs/website owners should focus on good end-user experience and aspire to be invited into people’s lives. Such experience depends, in part, on user psychology, ad placement and type (banner, floating, sidebar etc.).
People don’t like advertisements. TiVo, and ad-shielding browser plugins are examples of products that allow you reduce ads in your content. To add to that, our brain has a built-in ad-blocker. It programs us to ignore ads. If you visited Yahoo! Finance recently, you will probably not remember most of the banner and right-hand column display ads.
But, people are willing to read ads if they are looking for something and the ad helps them reach their goal and reduce their search cost or time. More than 40% of all online ad spend is on search advertising. And it’s growing faster than display and other forms of online advertising. A general purpose observation is that people are willing to look at ads if it helps them in some way–choose the right product (Search Engine Marketing), stay in touch with something (opt-in email), or laugh (Amul’s ads, Apple’s The PC guy and the Mac).
We can create good user experience if we interlace the above with some insights about how users read web pages. Take a look at the 2:1:1 Grid I uploaded. On the horizontal axis, I divided the screen into three parts. The first 50%, next 25% and the last 25% (2:1:1). Of this, the first 50% is important. It catches a user’s attention the moment a page loads. Of this, Block A is the most prominent. Google is smart in putting its logo here. Block B is next as the visitors eyes drop to that area after Block A. To provide a good user experience, I recommend not to give away Blocks A or B for advertising. Similarly, I also recommend not to use left side bar unless your site is very structured from user navigation perspective. E.g. check out wsj.com. It uses a side navigation bar because the newspaper is structured and various sections like Markets/International etc. You could move from homepage to say, Markets page directly without having to navigate sequentially. Also, notice that WSJ advertised only below the navigation bar. In most computer/laptop screens, this ad appears below what is visible on the screen area. The page looks better without the ad, enhancing user experience. If you do not use left navigation bar, then I suggest you start your content right from the left most part of the page. E.g. Google has put content right from the start. If you have a blog, not many themes display your posts from the left-most part of the page. (e.g. this blog’s theme leaves some gap.)
The second and the third sections (25% each) are good candidates for ads, specially the last one. The middle section can be used both to advertise and to increase white space. The bottom of the page can be used for ads.
That brings me to the type of ads. I gave my observations below:
- Left hand side bar ads will generally be in blocks A and B and so I do not recommend you allow ads in those areas. Ditto with banner ads.
- Floating ads (moves across the user’s screen or floats above the content) distract people.
- Expanding ads (changes size and which may alter the contents of the webpage) may block content that viewer is looking for. It has high distraction value. Expanding ads are better suited at the bottom of the page as the user would have read the contents of the page and may not bother even if it blocks the content.
- Pop-up, Pup-under (window is loaded or sent behind the current window so that the user does not see it until she closes one or more active windows), Trick-banner (looks like a dialog box with buttons. It simulates an error message or an alert) – all these have an element of tricking a user and reduce user’s experience. I don’t recommend these.
- Playing video and audio ads on click is better experience than auto playing them.
- People tend to skip interstitial ads (display of ads before requested content).
- For text ads, letting the background of the text ads merge with the background of the page gives a better experience than the ad having a different background or putting a box around an ad.
- Embedding (ads as) hyperlinks (to words not directly related), advertorials etc. also have a trick element.
- Some animation is ok. Too much animation or video (without audio) does not enhance user-experience. Somehow, slow moving animation gives a better experience than fast moving.
- Scrolling ads are better suited at the bottom of the page.
LinkedIn does advertising well. Even rich media ads blend so well into it’s website that many of its users don’t realize that it advertises. Such eye for quality user experience will help grow the core business of the website along with earning revenue from ads and higher traffic generated because of good user experience.
References:
1. Is Advertising Dead? Guy Kawasaki
2. The Rule of Thirds
3. Online Advertising
4. The decade in online advertising
