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When Online Ad Agencies Don’t Understand User Behavior
by Aaron Gray

Web User Psychology
Take a look at the banner ad below…

Now picture yourself at work in the morning. You’re busy, but you check out the latest fallout on TheStandard.com to see if anything is going down. You’re on a mission, really. A mission for information. Anything that is not part of that mission you will tune out because it’s not central to what you are trying to accomplish at this moment.

As you scan the page looking for headlines that are of interest, the brick ad for Word 2001 for Mac catches your attention. You remember that you want to check it out, but not now. Before you’ve finished that thought you’ve scanned the other two visible ads, neither one of which registers a connection with you. By this time, you’ve found a headline of interest and are clicking on it to go to the article.

What you’ve just envisioned is the basic psychological state of the web user. On a mission, and not interested in anything outside that mission. Given that, the banner above has the most basic of problems: it’s designed for the TV viewer, not the web user. "How’s that," you say? It’s designed for a passive audience, not a "user on a mission."

Click "Reload" to watch the ad from the beginning again.

Searching for Relevant Information
6 seconds pass before the company represented by the ad is mentioned in the copy, and a full 8 seconds pass before the company’s name and logo appear outside the copy. If you were sitting in your easy chair watching TV, then this ad would be effective. The problem is that users on a mission don’t watch online ads for 6 or 8 seconds. At most, their eyes dart over them for a fraction of a second in the search for information that is relevant to the "mission" at hand. This means that as an online ad designer, you have less than one second to catch the attention of your target audience. And you don’t know which fraction of a second in your animation sequence is the one they’ll see.

In this ad the two most important units of information are "Payroll Outsourcing" and "Fidelity Investments." Payroll is a headache to small-business people who are also employers (I know, because I am one). And Fidelity is how they can make that headace go away. To ensure the ad connects with the target when they’re actually looking at the ad, these two units of information should always be visible. Animating the messaging, however, is effective. Once you have the user’s attention (once they perceive your ad as relevant to them), you can drive home the message: Outsourcing your payroll is an investment in your business, not an expense. But the primary units of information should always be visible, as they are how the user will judge relevance and register an impression of the brand. Even if payroll outsourcing isn’t relevant, at least the user will register the brand as they scan the visible elements of the page.

Opportunity Lost
The following problem would be funny, if it didn’t completely nullify the direct-response aspect of the ad. Look at the ad again. Now click to see what page I was given when I clicked on the ad.

Where’s the payroll? I hunted around for a almost a minute, then gave up. There’s nothing on that page that addresses the reason I came here in the first place, which is payroll. Failing to provide a relevant landing spot for inbound ad clicks that provides adequate context for the inbound user renders the entire ad buy a colosal waste of money. In fairness, I think Fidelity meant for me to go here. But that’s not what happened (I didn’t find the intended page until I was wrting this, months after my encounter with the ad), so they lost their opportunity with me.

By the way, the reason I’ve provided screen shots rather than linking directly to the page in question is because Fidelity has made it impossible to bookmark or link to a page within the site through the use of session cookies that timeout after only a few hours -- a usability problem in its own right.

Other Issues
A final problem with this ad lies in the animation itself. Ads that animate infinitely can be very distracting and annoying to users tying to read copy. In usability tests, some users have even been observed putting sticky notes on their screen to cover ads that go on and on. More commonly, users simply scroll until the ad is hidden from view, but that’s not always possible. While this isn’t a usability problem for the ad designers per se (many would argue that the point is to get people to look at the ad), it does run the risk of generating bad will toward a brand if an ad is particularly annoying and/or irrelevant to the user. Further, sites that force users to look at ads by putting them in frames run the same risk. This is an issue that site owners will ultimately have to tackle. How much control over the user’s experience of your site are you willing to give over to your advertisers? Especially since most advertisers interest in attracting attention is counter to your interest in providing a positive, satisfying user experience. It’s not an easy question to answer.

Next month I’ll be talking about making an ad relevant to the user.