If It Looks Like An Ad They Ignore It

I love these studies. Whereas an impressive amount of money is spent everyday on banner ads, a new eye tracking study shows that online users are trained to ignore them. Usability Expert Jakob Nielsen, who’s been studying how people interact with webpages since there were webpages to interact with, follows up on previous explorations to show once again that people not only ignore content that looks like advertising, but need things plainly spelled out for them.

The task was simple enough: find the country’s current population. Nielsen even gave them the website to use. But 86 percent of users failed to find the answer even though it was displayed in large red letters in plain sight.

“Users tend to ignore heavily formatted areas because they look like advertisements. Thus, about 1/3 of users never even saw the Population Clock. However, most people did fixate on this area because it’s not as overly formatted as most promotional features. So, most users saw the Population Clock; they just didn’t use it, even though it contained the exact information they were looking for.”

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1. Thanks Alex for great presentation about e - marketing. I learn many new things about key word search, domain name and more.

   Posted by Srdjan Djordjevski on 09/08 at 07:35 AM