As of the date of this writing, many companies have been implementing their social mobile engagement strategy by putting printed Facebook and Twitter “buttons” on everything from print advertising to packaging.

Here is example from the chocolate bar wrapper we discussed in the previous article:

And here is another example of the same “buttons” on a high-end spa advertisement in a wellness journal.

These “buttons” are supposed to drive engagement with the product or ad via social media on their mobile device, in context, e.g. while looking at the ad or opening a wrapper. Does this strategy work? Or would something else, like a QR code, be more appropriate in this situation?

Personally, I’d like to propose the following 6 Reasons Printed Buttons Must Die:

1. Printed buttons are amateurish.

It’s quite accepted by now that every company worthy of its name has a presence on major social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  Adding this fact to a product packaging merely makes your company look like an amateur in social networking space: “Of course you are on Facebook. Isn’t everyone? Did they just get on there or something? And, does this mean you guys aren’t also on Google Plus/whatever (insert your favorite social network name here)?”

2. Printed buttons require extra work and are error prone.

Let’s say that for some unfathomable reason, I really do want to follow Simply Lite chocolate company on Twitter. Really. Forget the why for a second, let’s concentrate on the how. The first thing I have to do is type in a query. Typing on mobile phone is work. But even if I do this work, as you can see, I have plenty of results to confuse my next step:

Which one should I pick? How about simplylite? As it happens, simplylite, is not the droid I am looking for. But instead a rather single-minded young lady:

Other top picks include simplylites and simplylite1. The right choice happens to be behind door #4: the unfortunately named SimplyLiteChoc – the last search result!

By using the “buttons”, the company forces customers to guess the Twitter handle and type it in. The company further risks losing the possible connection through any Twitter handle that is the least bit unintuitive as it is easily lost in the over-abundance of information.

3. Printed buttons deliver no value.

Not only is engaging with the company through these “buttons” is difficult, there is simply no value to the customer holding the chocolate bar to engage with the company’s Twitter feed.

Frankly, I find the simplylite young lady considerably more engaging. As it turns out, numbers support my conclusion: SimplyLite company’s social media strategy has yielded a whooping 26 followers (Wow!) under the SimplyLiteChoc Twitter handle:

While 36 people (or about 50% more) are following the simplylite lady. In the words of Dr. Phil: “Simply Lite, how is that strategy working for ya?”. Not very well, obviously.

4. Printed buttons are fake.

These printed “buttons” look modern, hip and digital. The “button” design borrowed from the iPhone App Store and Android Market implies that they are clickable. They are not.

It is as though the company is trying to play a game of pretend, much like my 6-year-old building a spaceship control panel from an old cardboard box, stickers and tape:

Note that she used tree leaves for take-off and landing buttons, proving that in the future green technology is really going to be huge… But I digress. For 6-year-olds, pretend is a fantastic game to play. If you are a company, however, the game of pretend simply does not work. Unless maybe if you are Disney, in which case, go right ahead.

For companies seeking to engage with their customers in social media, the hip printed digital “buttons” send the wrong message. They are not pretend. They are fake.

5. Printed buttons are not scalable.

What happens when your company expands past a 2 social networks? How does the fake printed “button” strategy “scale”? Here is an example from a recent print ad from Williams Sonoma with 4 different printed “buttons”:

When will this “mobile social engagement strategy” run out of print space? When they add Flickr, Tumblr, Gowalla, Google Plus? Obviously, this kind of growth is unsustainable.

6. Printed button logos don’t mean a thing.

Although Facebook, Twitter and YouTube enjoy almost universal recognition, at least among the 10,000 elite super-geeks of the San Francisco Bay Area’s High-Tech community, I have not the foggiest idea what obscure social network the fake button #4 is supposed to connect me to:

Maybe if push this “button” really hard and make the modem beeping noise with my lips: “beeeep… chk….click…beeeeep…chk chk… pop…beeeep….” Nope, that didn’t work. Sorry Williams Sonoma. I guess it’s broken.

There is a better way to help your customers engage with your print ad or product packaging using social media: a well-constructed QR code campaign. And I will give you the secrets of social media engagement through QR code in the exciting conclusion of this article (coming up in 2 weeks). Don’t miss a thing! Sign up below if you are not part of my Tablet & Mobile Design Secrets newsletter.

In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. If you missed it, read Part 1, which covered these best practices:

• Integrate your ads’ appearance with the rest of your site.
• Make sure customers can easily distinguish ads from content.
• Keep ads relevant and appropriate.
• Understand how your customers interact with ads.

In Part 2, we’ll discuss the following best practices:

• Understand what makes a good ad.
• Limit cannibalization.
• Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising.
• Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no search results.

Let’s dig in!

Understand What Makes a Good Ad

Based on the findings of eyetracking studies, we’ve seen that users spontaneously pay attention to things that are

• concrete
• actionable
• not like marketing

These findings apply to both typical search results and third-party ads. Thus, a good ad is concrete and to the point rather than full of generic, marketing jargon. For example, it might present a picture of the actual item being advertised or indicate clearly that there’s free shipping rather than saying something like We have thousands of cheap items in stock! As shown in Figure 1, the ads on Cars.com are actually pretty good.

Figure 1—Good ads with appropriate content on Cars.com

This ad on Cars.com follows an important principle: It is highly relevant to the search results on the page, calling customers’ attention to the specific item in the search results. Even though the ad at the top of the page is a banner ad, it doesn’t have the drawbacks of typical banner ads—such as presenting irrelevant content or being positioned too far away from the main content. The price quote, showing good value, is prominent and provides a good call to attention. The presentation of the ad is very straightforward, with concrete information and little marketing language or visual noise.

Is it enough that an ad’s content be appropriate? While content is important, it is just one aspect of the marketing message. Another important principle of ad appropriateness is keeping an ad’s style appropriate to the topic. Contrast the style of the Cars.com ad to the ad on the Yahoo! Movies page, pictured in Figure 2. Even without seeing the flashy animation, it is clear that the ad is quite vibrant.

Figure 2—An appropriate ad style on Yahoo! Movies has bling

An ad with this animated style is highly appropriate if we expect customers to be getting ready for an action-adventure movie experience complete with special effects. In this case, tasteful, yet somewhat loud movie ads, providing links to previews, are not only appropriate, but expected. This example shows how carefully chosen ads can form a large part of a Web page’s useful content, making it unnecessary for Yahoo! to work so hard at keeping the page exciting. The ad in Figure 2 calls out a specific item within a set of search results that appears on the page.

When it comes to hosting ads, it definitely pays to get creative. In our research, we learned that the way an ad is presented matters a great deal in how customers perceive both the ad and the site hosting it. Creative, interesting presentations get extra points, especially if they are unobtrusive. For example, the peel-the-corner ad on EddieBauer.com, shown in Figure 3, is a great example of an ad that draws attention and invites participation, without obnoxiously dominating an experience.

Figure 3—Getting creative with an interactive, peel-the-corner ad

Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people do not mind interacting with this kind advertising and consider peel-the-corner style ads acceptable or even positive on a wide range of sites—if the ads contain appropriate content.

What kind of customer action should an ad invite? In Figure 1, the ad on Cars.com asked customers to purchase or consume a specific item on the same Web site—for example, purchase a Lexus. The ad in Figure 2 invited customers to participate in an offline interaction they will perform after viewing the ad—see a movie after reading a movie review and referring to a theater schedule on Yahoo! Movies. These are both examples of passive ads—that is, they do not invite customers to click, so much as capture eyeballs, with the purpose of instilling a subliminal desire to select a specific item among many that a site offers. This mirrors a classic bricks-and-mortar advertising strategy, in which certain companies pay stores to feature their brands on banners and place their products in prominent locations.

However, the Web is a very dynamic medium, leading to all sorts of novel advertising models. One advertising model involves carrying your competitors’ ads, advertising similar products for sale on a different Web site or in another store. On the one hand, customers’ clicking these ads generates marketing revenue. On the other hand, this marketing revenue literally eats into the sales revenue from products and services your Web site provides. Thus, competitors’ ads cause what is known as cannibalization.

Limit Cannibalization

Generally, carrying competitors’ ads is a dangerous and losing proposition, because cannibalization involves many hidden costs that are often hard to quantify. Most companies spend a lot of money on advertising, to bring customers to their own Web sites. If customers click a competitor’s advertisement, not only is there an opportunity cost—because those customers do not buy your own service or product—there is also a hidden cost—you’ve wasted your marketing dollars.

In addition to cannibalization’s threatening your bottom line, the experience of your customers’ clicking your competitors’ ads is likely to be disconcerting to them, leaving them less satisfied with your site as a result. Most competitors’ ads just dump customers on the home page of their site or, at best, on a search results page, leaving them to figure out how to navigate to the one item they want—for instance, to compare a competitor’s price for an item they were looking at on your site. Thus, clicking an ad almost always involves extra work for your customers. For this reason, if your customers are getting the results they want on your site, most do not click a competitor’s ad—unless

• the ad makes a very attractive offer or
• the competitor’s brand is stronger

Some sites understand their customers’ reluctance to do extra work and consciously decide to exploit this fact by hosting competitors’ ads—boosting their revenue without much cannibalization of their own sales. The key to doing this successfully is making rational judgments regarding which ads to host, based on your overall site revenue strategy and hard site traffic statistics. Some successful strategies for carrying competitors’ ads include the following:

• making competitors’ ads look like advertising—Customers deliberately ignore such ads, and they get very few clicks. This strategy works great if you get paid for ad impressions, not by the number of clicks.
• carrying only ads for weaker brands—This limits the number of customers who click away from your site.
• not allowing ads to display competitors’ prices—Displaying the actual prices for specific competing goods or services encourages customers to click ads.

The competitor ad on Yahoo! Cars, shown in Figure 4, provides a good example for all three of these strategies.

Figure 4—Competitor advertising on Yahoo! Cars

Another interesting strategy involves completely embracing the experience of offering the best marketplace price from whatever source and being fully committed to always carrying ads from various competitors. You can see one example of this strategy on Buy.com, which we discussed in Part 1 of this column. Buy.com shows prices from eBay and Dell, as well as the price for the product from its internal search engine. This strategy works well in any of the following cases:

• Your site has the best price.
• Differences in price are not significant.
• Competitors’ prices do not give a complete picture—for example, items for sale are used or have high shipping costs, but their ads do not communicate these details.

Provide Ads for Internal Merchandise Instead of Third-Party Advertising

Amazon.com uses an interesting variation on this strategy, carrying the same items from both Amazon’s own store and their online marketplace, as pictured in Figure 5.

Figure 5—Ad for the Amazon marketplace

This is a win-win situation for both Amazon and their customers. Amazon collects rich fees from sellers in their marketplace, so they make money regardless of which items customers purchase. Having a marketplace also benefits consumers by providing multiple, highly relevant shopping options without presenting anything that looks or feels like an ad. This strategy is very tricky, because Amazon is essentially competing with their own sellers. However, despite the challenges, this strategy has been quite successful—in large part because Amazon has been very proactive, constantly adjusting their price points and the inventory of items they carry to keep their marketplace thriving and provide customers with the comfort of knowing they are getting very good prices from a brand they trust.

Amazon’s strategy reflects a more general principle: Whenever possible, providing and upselling merchandise to customers is almost always better than hosting third-party ads. There are many good reasons to host your own merchandising rather than third-party ads, including the following:

• control—No matter how carefully you screen third-party ads, undesirable content sometimes slips through, harming your brand and sending your hard-earned customers to your competition.
• visual design—Despite your best efforts at ad customization, third-party ads look like, well, ads. On the other hand, you can fully integrate merchandising into your site, make the best use of your available space.
• specificity—Third-party ads are often not very specific to a site’s own products—nor would you want them to be, because that would drive your customers to the competition. On the other hand, you can make merchandising as specific as necessary, because in this case, all ads ultimately drive traffic back to your own site, where transactions convert directly to your bottom line.

Merchandising simply offers a better user experience. People like specific, targeted content that does not look like an ad, but helpfully provides ideas and choices.

Pay Special Attention to Ads If There Are No Search Results

When there are no results, search results pages are an especially dangerous place to host advertising. All of the negatives of displaying competitors’ ads that we discussed earlier become further exacerbated on a no search results page. Such a page is generally devoid of your own content, making third-party ads their primary calls to action.

As I described in my earlier column “Starting from Zero: Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages,” no search results pages indicate to customers they’ve over-constrained their query and need to reformulate or broaden their search. Displaying third-party ads on a no search results page invites customers to abandon their natural behavior of iterative search in favor of following a fresh information scent. This interrupts the finding flow on your site and dumps your customers directly into your competitors’ greedy hands.

Unfortunately, marketing folks often simply fail to grasp the iterative nature of the finding process and the critical role the no search results page plays in helping customers reformulate their queries. Some of them like to put ads on no search results pages, justifying their viewpoint by saying something like this: We are simply meeting the customer’s needs with our ads. The customer would leave our site anyway. We are just helping him and making some money along the way.

This thinking demonstrates a dangerous and fundamental lack of understanding of the differences between how search engines and ad-hosting services should work. Search engines that are internal to a Web site typically combine keywords, using an AND operator. Thus, they look for items or content that contain all of the keywords a customer provides. This practice often leads to over-constrained queries, limiting the finding conversation between a person and a Web site.

Now, let’s contrast search engine results with hosted advertising results. Search engines providing hosted ads have no requirements for fidelity or specificity—the rules by which a site’s own search engine usually abides. By using an OR operator instead of AND, hosted ad servers can cherry-pick ads, displaying only the most relevant ads or those matching the most profitable keywords in a customer’s query, and ensure the ad server never fails to produce results. Also, when an ad only approximately matches a query, you can replace the ad’s title with dynamic text that exactly matches the keywords in the query.

For example, in one particularly memorable usability study, a task asked participants to find a ticket to a performance of the Nutcracker in San Francisco, during the holidays. After reading the task, one participant typed the query Nutcracker Ballet in San Francisco December 1-31st, which, of course, matched no results on the site. However, the ad hosting engine produced a page similar to that shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6—Ads matching the query Nutcracker Ballet in San Francisco December 1-31st

Upon seeing the no search results page displaying these ads, the participant promptly clicked an ad and bought a ticket from a competing site, even though cheaper tickets were readily available on the site we were testing. If the participant had relaxed her query, she would have discovered this, but instead, the third-party advertising appearing on the no search results page led her down a different path. When there are no search results, that is the wrong place and time for displaying third-party ads.

As this story demonstrates, it is very easy to lose customers on no search results pages, which represent a critical juncture in a conversation between a customer and a Web site—an opportunity for the customer to reformulate a query and gain a deeper connection with your brand. Host third-party ads on your no search results pages only as a last resort. We recommend you carefully calculate the cost of doing so. Which click would generate more long-term revenue: the ad or the tools for query reformulation? Which click would ultimately engender more long-term loyalty and a better relationship with your customers?

In Conclusion

In his keynote speech at the 2008 Business Of Software conference, Seth Godin famously quipped, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” The same goes for hosting advertising. UX professionals should be actively involved in ad-hosting decisions to make sure your company’s golden goose continues to thrive, well beyond the current quarter.

We want to encourage you to use these ideas as a starting point for developing your own comprehensive merchandising and ad-hosting strategies. Making the tough choices that are necessary and getting creative with ad hosting is not easy, but it is an absolute must if your company is to survive and thrive in the current economic environment.

Conflicting demands make many UX professionals think of ads as a necessary evil. Customers frequently go out of their way to say they hate ads, while marketers always seem to try their hardest to stuff as many of them as they can on each search results page on your site. This leaves many UX design professionals caught in the middle, trying to balance the ad equation—and frequently failing to fully satisfy either customers or marketers. For this 2-part column, I’ve teamed up with advertisement and eyetracking research guru Frank Guo to present real-world strategies for successfully integrating ads into your search results. The goal is making money without unduly turning off your customers.

Don’t Kill Your Golden Goose

Internet ads have gone full circle—from the Ads are great! Now, we can make money on anything! mania of the early 1990s to the Ads are dead post-dot-com bust philosophy. Currently, the notion that ads are a legitimate way of boosting revenues on an ecommerce site seems to be making a comeback—in part, because this is a tough economy for many etailers. Every penny counts, and every stream of potential revenue demands careful consideration. However, research and experience show that, for an online business to succeed and thrive, it is important to temper any temptation to load up on ads and get a quick revenue boost this quarter with broader, long-term considerations—like user experience, customer loyalty, and brand attributes. If you are not careful, trying to squeeze out a few more eggs can easily kill your golden goose.

However, following a few simple guidelines—while listening carefully to your customers—can help your business make money with ads, without compromising either long-term customer loyalty or your brand image. Here are the best practices we’ll discuss in Part I of this column:

• Integrate your ads’ appearance with the rest of your site.
• Make sure customers can easily distinguish ads from content.
• Keep ads relevant and appropriate.
• Understand how your customers interact with ads.

Integrate Your Ads’ Appearance with the Rest of Your Site

In recent years, Google has emerged as the industry-leading supplier of ads on the Web. Indeed, Google ads make it easy—and often profitable—for you to sign up and host ads on your Web site. Most of the time, the ad content is fairly well targeted, so many retailers, bloggers, and developers of social networking sites have taken advantage of the opportunity to host Google ads. Unfortunately, few have made the effort to customize the boxed ads to make them look like the rest of their site. Figure 1 shows the social networking site Fishing.net, which carries Google ads just as they come “out of the box,” without any customization.

Figure 1—On Fishing.net, Google ads have no customization.

Neglecting to customize third-party ads is, of course, easier, but there are consequences to this approach:

• Customers frequently perceive your entire site as cluttered and disorganized.
• Customers mostly ignore the ads, because they look different from the rest of your content.

This is a lose-lose situation. Your customers lose out, because their experience of your site is degraded. Your marketers lose out, because customers click their ads less often—if at all.

Experience shows that a small amount of visual design and programming effort that makes your ads look like the rest of your site can yield tremendously positive responses from your customers. They stop seeing ads as clutter and instead perceive them as content. Google, of course, provides a superb example of this strategy in practice, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2—Google.com sets the standard for ad placement and integration.

Google has carefully crafted their customer experience, paying strict attention to everything from page balance and spacing to tweaking even the smallest visual design elements. In a recent Q&A with G. Hotchkiss, Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products & User Experience, described how replacing the box that used to contain ads on the right side of search results pages with a vertical line separator improved ad traffic, because of the ads’ closer integration with the content.

Make Sure Customers Can Easily Distinguish Ads from Content

When taken to the extreme, the guideline to better integrate ads and content becomes a design antipattern. Customers’ being unable to distinguish ads from content becomes especially painful and disruptive when a Web site carries a large number of ads. For example, on Fishing.com, as pictured in Figure 3, there are so many closely integrated ads that they become virtually indistinguishable from the content—to the extent that it becomes difficult to understand what service the site actually provides.

Figure 3—Ads on Fishing.com are overwhelming and confusing.

However, even if the number of ads on your site is not overwhelming, customers can have difficulty distinguishing them from content. One very common problem is providing different types of search results—some of which stay on the same site, while others take customers elsewhere. (We should note that surprising customers about where links go is never a problem for Google or other Web search engines, because both their ads and their search results take searchers to other sites.)

On the other hand, for destination sites that sell their own merchandise or provide a branded service, while also hosting third-party ads, it is important to positively differentiate between ads, legitimate content, and featured—that is, paid—results. Autotrader.com, which is pictured in Figure 4, mixes many different types of search results together, so it’s hard to tell what clicking each result might do. Orange results are actual, “organic” search results, while the slightly padded results in blue are really paid advertisements.

Figure 4—Autotrader.com mixes many different types of search results.

When clicking a search results link takes searchers somewhere surprising or, by mistake, they click a featured result, their reaction is often very negative. Yet, to the extent that a link satisfies a customer’s need, clicking it can be a very positive experience—finding exactly what the customer was looking for. The key to solving this problem is grouping the different kinds of content, while making it clear what are paid advertisements or featured results and clearly differentiating paid content from organic search results through subtle, but telling visual cues.

Colin Ware, in his book Information Visualization: Perception for Design describes so-called preattentive attributes, which involve the early stage of visual perception that occurs mostly below the level of conscious thought, at a very high speed. He distinguishes four categories of preattentive attributes: form, color, spatial position, and motion. We can apply the grouping strategies for all four categories of these attributes to ads, typically using line size, shape, hue, and enclosure to subtly differentiate ads from content. Motion applies mainly to animated ads, which can be an appropriate differentiation strategy, depending on their content. (We will discuss this further in Part 2.)

Google’s search results provide a great example of subtle preattentive differentiation. As shown in Figure 2, Google displays three kinds of results on search results pages:

• ads at the top—Their subtle, yellow background hue differentiates them from the organic results.
• organic search results in the middle—These are the actual content.
• ads in the column on the right—Their placement and narrow column format differentiate them from the organic results, plus a vertical line sets them off.

Overall, the results on this page fit together and flow really well, while the ads’ formats subtly, but unequivocally differentiate them from the content.

Customers’ ability to effectively differentiate various types of content diminishes as the numbers of different types and sources of content appearing on a page increase—even when the content is grouped appropriately and visually integrated, using the site’s colors and fonts. At some point, a search results page simply reaches its point of saturation, and it becomes impossible for customers to tell the different types of search results apart. When doing usability studies for a major etailer that provided ten different types of search results, Greg found that most test participants could not distinguish one type of result from another when scrolling through search results pages. Thus, the experience became overwhelming for people using the site, who were often frustrated, because they never knew where they were about to go when they clicked a search result.

Buy.com, pictured in Figure 5, is another site that is oversaturated with different types of search results and ad content. There are at least 13 different formats for third-party ads on a single page! No surprise, the site rating service Internet Retailer commented, “The site all but overwhelms its visitors with information and options.”

Figure 5—Buy.com’s different types of ads and third-party content are overwhelming.

For your search results pages to be effective, they must display only a limited number of different types of content and ad formats. Otherwise, with no clear guidance, your main content gets lost and customers become confused, because they are overwhelmed by the number of things competing for their attention. The key to integrating ads into your search results, without destroying the finding experience is becoming really clear about what generates the most site revenue. Is it the ads? Or the content? Does it depend on the query? Have you made the costly mistake of serving as many ads to your top customers as you do to window-shoppers and people who just happen to drop by? Once you’ve answered these key questions, you must remain disciplined and stay focused on your core earning potential. Though you can provide occasional, helpful third-party content on the side—particularly, if it helps a customer make a decision.

For example, can you tell whether Buy.com makes more money if people buy the headphones shown on the page—or instead investigate how to make their sandwiches moist and juicy with Best Foods Mayonnaise? Or maybe Buy.com really rolls in the dough when people buy their headphones from eBay or Dell instead? From their page content and layout, it is impossible to tell. One gets the impression that Buy.com may itself be somewhat confused about where the bulk of their revenue is coming from.

Keep Ads Relevant and Appropriate

While many people are, at best, only dimly aware of ads, some ads are so toxic that hosting them can damage your brand perception and destroy the entire user experience of your site. While everyone, no doubt, has his or her own list of the most annoying advertisements ever, one of Greg’s favorite examples is the infamous animated popup ads featuring the X10 spy cam that became popular in the early 2000s. The ad was, at once, so annoying and so ubiquitous, that X10 bears the dubious distinction of having been one of the first companies to get people to register on the company Web site just to opt out from seeing their ads for 30 days. Figure 6 shows one version of the X10 ad.

Figure 6—The infamous X10 popup ads were some of the most annoying ever.

Even though ads may not be utterly obnoxious, they can nevertheless be completely inappropriate. Ad placement is often the key. FoxNews.com, which is pictured in Figure 7, shows just how insensitive and inappropriate some ads can be.

Figure 7—The insensitivity of inappropriate ads on FoxNews.com is striking.

The news story on the page describes the accidental death of a Marine, yet ads for yellow teeth litter the page. Putting politics aside, how do you think the dead person’s family felt when viewing this story? How about all the other families who have fathers, husbands, sons, or daughters serving overseas? Please, make sure your ads are appropriate to the content on a page. One way of doing that is to conduct user research and learn how your customers react to particular ads.

Understand How Your Customers Interact with Ads

Although usability studies and field research can give us important clues about how people interact with ads, eyetracking research can be especially helpful. Eyetracking studies help us to understand how customers perceive and interact with ads, then, depending on our objectives, design ads intelligently—to either catch or not catch their attention. Let’s look at an ad user experience that is different from the typical user experience. Customers definitely don’t come to a site just to look at ads, so they pay attention to them only in a spontaneous, but not intentional way. Thus, it’s hard to ask them about whether they paid attention to ads, because they probably won’t be 100% sure. Eyetracking can fill this gap in our knowledge.

By meticulously tracking all eye movement during a test, you can tell whether and how a participant pays attention to the ads on a Web page, what visual search pattern he uses, and how he either skips or focuses on particular information on the page. (Note—When running eyetracking studies, spontaneity is key. If you interrupt a participant, ask questions, or have a broken prototype that doesn’t let a participant interact with it naturally, your eyetracking data gets contaminated with all sorts of noise.)

So, what does eyetracking methodology tell us about ads? First and foremost, we’ve observed the well-documented banner blindness—that is, customers typically ignore static banners—which are often located at the top of a Web page—even if they are of a ridiculously large size like those on Tutorialized.com, which are shown in Figure 8. Though research clearly shows people usually ignore banner ads, the banner ads on that site take up the entire area of the page above the fold, negatively impacting the user experience and forcing customers to scroll.

Figure 8—Banner ads on Tutorialized.com take up the entire window.

As Jakob Nielsen wrote in his August 20, 2007 Alertbox, “The most prominent result from the new eyetracking studies is not actually new. We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real.”

At this point, you may ask What makes a good advertisement? An excellent question we will answer—along with providing some other useful guidelines—in Part 2 of this column.