A phrase you often hear bandied around is “advertising online doesn’t work, people don’t click on banners”. There was a study by Jakob Nielson last summer which used eye tracking techniques to discover that users don’t click or even look at banner adverts. I am a big fan of Nielson’s studies but I’m fairly appalled by this study. My main problem with it is that lab conditions are completely unrealistic. Giving users specific tasks and then tracking their eye movement to record the user’s focus is not representative of real life. In real life people do have real needs and goals but they don’t have the constant feeling that they are being judged as they do in a lab situation.
The user feels they need to perform and, more importantly there is a specific cut off point where the experiment ends. In real life attention starts off focused on goals, dissipating over a short time period until focus is drawn to objects of lesser importance on the page. These items of lesser importance could be navigation or they could be banner adverts. After all, some banners are great fun (think Mac/PC, Talk to Frank or Mini Adventure). Consider booking a holiday online, you don’t immediately close your eyes and turn off your computer as soon as you’ve booked it. Usually, you would allow yourself to be distracted at certain points. These certain points are critical to anybody trying to get the user’s attention. Consider these points as opportunities to speak to your consumer. It’s rather like a conversation between three people, the consumer is speaking with their friend, you don’t simply jump in and tell them about a new detergent you’ve discovered. You have to wait. These opportunities exist on ‘Thank you’ pages, they exist on ‘Your status has been updated’ pages and they exist anywhere attention is likely to wane. I believe this is one of the major contributing factors of the success of Google, they provide advertising that is targeted to your needs but they provide it at exactly the correct moment. It’s about timing. And it’s the same reason why Facebook struggles to create consistent revenue from advertising – it simply hasn’t mastered timing.
