Ad serving and site design: A contarian view

I came across this post mentioning a contrarian view of Web site design and ad serving for newspaper sites. Designer Alan Jacobson is working on a client's site that features no ads on the home page and only one ad per page on interior pages. And the ads are "the biggest ads you've ever seen on interior pages."

This is risky from a traditional ad serving standpoint where a publisher needs to maximize impression opportunities by cramming as many ads on a page as the traffic will bear. Yet it's a courageous stand from both a usability and common sense standpoint. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen postulated as early as 1997 that non-targeted advertising doesn't work on the Web because using the Internet is a goal-directed activity, and the act of clicking on an ad inteferes with the goal at hand. (Two notable exceptions--search ads, which are highly relevant to the user's information-seeking goal, and classified advertising, which users view as content. Hence the meteoric rise of Google and paid search, as well as auction/classified sites like eBay.)

Against this philosophical backdrop, two things can mitigate an ad's chances of being seen or clicked. First, ALL publishers need to reduce information overload by serving fewer ads per page. Better to have one ad that gets noticed than three or six or nine that are tuned out. (Graphical banner advertising is a lost cause online. People inherently tune out anything that oozes, flashes, moves or blinks. On our own sites, text ads outperform graphical ads by as much as three-to-one. Jakob Nielsen explains why this is.)

By the way, Jacobson feels home pages should be reduced to fit on one screen without scrolling or zooming. I think that's a great idea, but a bit too idealistic for a content site which can generate additional interior traffic by adding more links than can fit on a page without scrolling or zooming. Indeed, Eyetrack studies have proven that the number of headlines viewed increases with the number of headlines available (click here and scroll to bottom). That said, our experience launching Summit's digital magazines indicates that users are very much attracted to the idea of seeing all the content on one screen with no scrolling or zooming. Still, most content site home pages could stand to shrink a bit from their current length, which are so lengthy they induce choice paralysis, where users click hardly anything at all.

Second, on B2B media Web sites, the ad must work hard to be as good or better than the editorial content the ad sits next to. Content is what gets clicked online, not advertising. The more the ad seems like good content (offers for white papers are a good example), even if it's from an advertiser, the more likely a user will click.

But this means forcing advertisers to change the way the produce online text ads, which are often thrown together at the last minute with zero forethought. This is what we're struggling with currently at Summit. If advertisers are pushing us for better results from their ads on our site, we must push them to become better marketers. And that ain't easy.