Will Text Ads Continue to Trounce Banner Ads?
March 30th, 2005 by NancyI recently built a few web pages, and articles such as “Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?” were extremely helpful when it came time to decide what sort of ads to include. This article was written in April, 2003, by Dr. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group.
The summary paragraph is as follows:
Text-only advertisements work far better than banners, but is this only due to their novelty? Search engine text ads will retain their superiority over time, but text ads on other sites will work only if they focus on directly meeting users’ needs.
The article goes on to talk about how text ads work for several reasons:
- They are not automatically disregarded by users with banner blindness
- They are a novelty
- They are taken more seriously because they can often communicate more effectively with users
The last reason might be the only one that lasts over time, Nielsen writes. Text ads are “forced to express a message in a few words,” and this focus is exactly what flashy, vague banners tend to lack.
He finishes the article with:
After ten years of watching Web users, one clear conclusion is that they are utterly selfish and live in the moment. Giving users exactly what they want, right now, is the road to Web success, and having to write small boxes of text encourages advertisers to travel it.
Good advice for those of us with web sites!
