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Excellent Alertbox from Jakob Nielsen today on banner blindness.

To whit: users don’t look at banners. Nielsen reports people do look at

* Plain text
* Faces
* Cleavage and other “private” body parts

You can trick people into viewing ads by making them look like site content or like browser messages:

banner spam

Yuck. We agree with Nielsen that such tricks should be avoided by ethical advertisers.

Nielsen on ad networks:

Ultimately, the fact that online ads get viewed more when they match surrounding content is a strike against the tendency to build advertising networks. If advertising spots are simply auctioned off, then you can’t design an optimized ad for each placement.

When you advertise through an advertising network, your ads will get fewer fixations than if you contract directly with the publisher for a specific placement and design your creative to fit that spot. As a result, you should bid less for network ads than for customized ads that you place yourself.

link to full article: Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings

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  • George Michie: Sorry Jim, this post was written in 2007. Apparently some of those products are gone.
  • Jim: Hey, I checked two products like dimdim and cutepdf but none is free. What are you talking about free and open source?
  • George Michie: If they keep hearing the same message, and seeing evidence in the data to back it up, something will have to give. There is hope on...
  • Tomas: I’ve been having the same argument with Google for months now and in the end there does seem to be a feature in the algorithm that...
  • George Michie: Doesn’t have to be, it can be intra-adgroup as well.
  • Josh: George – I take it you’re referencing a scenario where your exact-match keywords are not listed as negative exact match keywords...
  • George Michie: Melissa, you’re right, it’s always happened to varying degrees, particularly since the advent of extended broad match....
  • Mel66: I don’t think this is a bug. It’s been happening for years. It *is* impossible to manage, and I can’t help but wonder if...
  • George Michie: Thanks Matt, Sometimes humor serves a purpose.
  • George Michie: Ken, sadly, as Jim stated above, too few people look under the hood and raise Cain. We’re very fortunate to have great reps on...
  • Matt: This is great! I started out reading this with the same anger that I feel everyday I spend unnecessary amounts of time optimizing to get...
  • Ken Truman: Right on, George. This is yet another one of the vagaries of broad matching that continues to drive smart advertisers mad. Your post...
  • George Michie: Interesting idea, Mark. The question might be: would advertisers know someone’s Twitter handle? Most require an email, but I...
  • @markthijssen: What if you would ask a consumer about his experience with the product some days/weeks/months after the sale via twitter. This might...
  • George Michie: Thanks Kenny, Another particularly annoying variation on the theme involves flashing the brand ads around on general searches. The...

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