Does research show banner ads are useless?

When Jakob Nielsen speaks…

Jakob Nielsen is the website usability guru, and when he talks about usability, he is credited with complete authority. May seem strange when you visit his site — it looks like sites of 10 or more years ago. But everyone knew how to use them. His point is not that all sites should be like his, but that they should be as functional: to know when to behave like a user manual (easy to use, easy to navigate, and has all you will need in it) and when like a magazine (visually impressive, surprising, involving).

What Nielsen thinks of online ads

Nielsen’s ideas aren’t based on personal impressions, but on a great deal of observational research of web users behaviour. Now, speaking at the inaugural Web Experience Forum in Boston, Mass. he has some important news for advertisers as reported by Alistair Croll at GigaOm: Forget banner ads, which are purely interruptive, so users ignore them. Go for search ads, which users click more often than generally thought. Nielsen in this case does not give figures for his survey, but according to Croll:

Jakob showed the audience at WEF08 several videos, including heat charts of eye movement, to demonstrate this process. Some testers skimmed picture ads that contained text — but only briefly…Pictures that are content get attention; pictures that are “fluff,” visitors treat as an obstacle course to bypass, particularly when it’s bland photographs of “smiling lady with a headset” or “guy who looks happy with a service.”
…He even produced an example of a gigantic rat on ask.com (celebrating the year of the rat) that testers didn’t recall seeing. And this thing was half the screen!

Is Nielsen right about banner ads?

Mostly, I think. Banner ads can and do work, but only if they draw the eye and are relevant to the user’s reason to be there. Portals are an example, review sites another, and you could find others. But outside of these, when they are interruptive, they are mimicking the display ad world rather than the newspaper classified ads. Even in print media, it’s the classified ads that pay for themselves, and that’s why search-related ads do so well. Even then, billboards and newspapers often attract your attention when you aren’t particularly doing something else — e.g. waiting at the traffic lights or skimming through the pages — whereas web users tend to be more purposive, so the bar is pretty high. So although it’s too much to say they don’t work, they’ve got to be attractive and relevant at the same time.

Where banners win over search ads, though, is in catching people who didn’t already see themselves as potential customers. If a small number of clicks are converted into high value sales as a result, banner ads can pay for themselves many times over. The other important case where banners work is sponsorship, i.e. promotion rather than advertising. Their purpose is brand enhancement, rather than selling, so they don’t have to interrupt, just get the name noticed.

A good PR tip from Nielsen’s site

While it’s worth looking at the resources on Nielsen’s main site, it’s also worth looking at his biography page - which, despite a bit less navigation than I would like, does a very good job of publicizing him- I particularly like a couple of the spoofs he links to: Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter ‘C’ Unusable and Davezilla’s Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Fighting Styles (as shown above). Not only are they fun to read, but Nielsen’s listing them makes his otherwise rather austere presence much friendlier.