By Andy McCue, 24 November 2003 15:30
NEWS Businesses are still failing to get the most out of websites with clunky navigation and poor online advertising placement, according to research based on new eye-movement tracking technology that measures where surfers look on web pages.
The study, carried out by the Usability Company, monitored people's eye movements around the websites of The Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Times as they were asked to carry out tasks including finding the business section of the site, a football score from the previous night and information on the NHS.
One of the key findings of the research was that template-based designs where ads are always placed in the same position on a page are less effective as people learned very quickly where ads were likely to appear and subsequently ignored those areas of the page when browsing the rest of the site.
While study participants looked at the adverts on the right hand side of The Guardian home page they rarely looked at the right hand side of subsequent pages on the site. The same pattern emerged with the banner ad at the top of The Times website.
The report said: "It would certainly be more effective to alter the positioning of advertising from page to page (or at least section to section) of a site. People find it much easier to scan information vertically than horizontally."
Advertising positioned within the body of the site also has a far greater probability of being recalled than advertising located in the traditional areas for advertising, such as the top of the page and to the right hand side, according to the research.
While there were variations in the eye movements of people from site to site and even from page to page within each site, a consistent pattern emerged in that people look to the middle of a page initially then towards the area usually inhabited by the logo of the site, followed by the left hand side, where they expect to find the main navigation menu.
Research participants found The Times site to be the best structured and balanced. People found the use of colours on The Guardian site to help delineate the page but it took longer than other websites to navigate using the top level horizontal menu bar.
The Financial Times came off worst, with participants being confused by the amount of information on the homepage reflected in their eyes darting around the page without fixating on anything in particular.
Marty Carroll, director at the Usability Company and author of the report, said the eye tracking technology provides hard evidence that people do pay attention to interesting and well-placed online ads and that clickthrough figures are not necessarily an effective way to measure the success of ad campaigns.
"We hope it will change how ads are pushed," he said. "The web doesn't have to be a direct marketing tool. It is about branding as well."
Comments
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1. Alex The Great
Great, this is all we need...
now, instead of having ads in the corners where they can be ignored, they are going to start popping up smack in the middle of the page, all over the content.
The Times and Telegraph are the worst for this already, as their stupid flash ads appear all over the story you are trying to read. The ads are completely irrelevant to the story as well.
when will advertisers learn it's all about targetting to your audience? I don't want to see random products advertised all over pages that I'm trying to read, that have no interest for me. Ads for football shirts for example are just about bearable if you're on a football site, but The Times recently had intrusive ads for some random program on Sky all over it.
It's also annoying when they come with sound, particularly when you are reading them when you're supposed to be at work...
2. jez
as the vast majority of users are totally uninterested in adverts, surely it's better that they're are always in the same 'ignore me' space - it's very handy. maybe by poor web design you mean poor advertising click throughs?
making adverts easy for users to ignore is definately not poor web design.
3. anonymous
Badly designed web pages may take a little more effort to navigate, but nothing not even pop-ups are as annoying as animated adverts in or next to blocks of text.
4. Paul M Ross
This article refers to web design being poor primarily from an advertiser's point-of-view. Other points of view do exist...
Mr. Carroll's quote "We hope it will change how ads are pushed," reflects the same grim determination apparent in the attitudes of spammers, salesmen and other such upstanding members of the industry.
5. Tim Jackson
Randomising the placement of ads may make them harder for the reader to ignore, but it also makes it harder for the reader to read the real content.
Reading Silicon.com articles already means reading a story winding through the adverts like something from Alice in Wonderland. If I didn't have an "ignore areas" template in my mind I'd probably give up reading them altogether. As it is I don't even see the ads, they are like a blind spot.
Publishers would need to consider the increased hit rate on the adverts set against the overall loss of readership.
6. Andrew Flack
Animated ads are like driving in the rain and watching the road through windscreen wipers. I have a tendancy to either 1) deliberately 'look away from' 2) 'censor out' the flicking ad, or 3) position the screen such that it is off screen if I want to read another part of the screen without distraction.
If there are enough (i.e. too many) on a website I will even drop the website from ones I visit.
It is only the quality of the editorial on Silicon.com which has stopped me doing just that.
Even pop-up and pop-under ads are less annoying, as you can knock them out.
7. anonymous
Most people I know hate web adverts, especially the new flash adverts,and I wouldn't be surprised if i recieved some more spam mail after replying to this article
8. Stephen Holmes
"The web doesn't have to be a direct marketing tool. It is about branding as well." Odd - I thought it was about publishing useful information.
I've speeded up access both at work and home by adding doubleclick, link4ads, adbureau, mediaplex, et al. to the gateway ban list (it also displays silicon.com content as a single plain page of text :-) ). Home users can do the same by adding the advertising domains to their hosts file pointing to localhost, or simply get the hosts file from Ad-Aware.
9. Steve S
What next - CENTRE LANE BILLBOARDS!?
10. Dave
The only part of the design that is poor is that the adverts are there in the first place. Why do web-sites think I'm interested in having to download loads of flashy adverts shoved down my throat. It's the on-line equivalent of telesales. I don't want them phoning me up either. If I'm interested in double glazing I'll look into it. In the same way if I'm not happy with my credit card (advert to the right of this page as I'm filling it in) I'll look into what's available. I go to a site to look at the content not the adverts. Any site that starts putting adverts inside the parts I'm trying to read will be just distracting and I'll never go back again.