Why Contextual Advertising Works, and will Work for Your Website

As we spend greater lengths of time surfing the internet, we inadvertantly aquire traits and habits that streamline our progress through its pages. One such trait is known as banner blindness, and it's quite possible to attribute the decline in garish, loud advertising schemes, and the recent success of contextual text advertisments to its effects.

Recent studies conducted by the Nielsen/Norman Group found that internet users avoided viewing banner advertisments. Text advertising is read more often than display advertisements according to the data collected using eye movement tracking hardware.

Everyone has generated a schema of how the average website is constructed, and the longer someone has been browsing the internet, the less time his or her eyes will stray from this schema when scanning a new webpage. Does this mean that the adverts are ignored due to where they are positioned? Contextual advertising has changed how advertising works, but generally, webmasters allocate advertising space in a similar vein as always to maintain consistency. This means that the appearance of adverts is a greater factor in their success than their positioning.

Studies of the same type also conclude that increasing the aggressiveness of the adverts, in relation to their size, contrasting colors and flashing animations do not counter the effects of banner blindness. On the contrary, such banners have been noted to deter visitors with greater regularity. Webmasters speculate this is the result of such banners being associated with negative experiences in the past, such as leading to websites that install malicious code, include pop-ups, or even just contain irrelevant and unsuitable content.

What does this mean for your website? Adopting AdSense, Overture, AdCenter or any other contextual advertising schemes in your website that display text advertising, is a viable alternative to banners and flashy adverts as a way of generating, new or additional streams of revenue. You should keep in mind when adding such adverts to your website that their success depends on a few factors other than the volume of traffic running through your website. Your main concern is their appearance; something we can't forget, even when dealing with text advertisments. The closer your adverts resemble or match the colour scheme you have on your website, the greater the potential click through rates. Some claim this is misleading, to suggest that the paid links are infact internal links within your website, however, it is argued that this example is only another expression of banner blindness, where internet users are ignoring what doesn't seem related or "part" of the page they are viewing.

As always, there are those who try to flaunt the system. With text adverts blending seamlessly into webpages, its not too uncommon to see them at prime positions on webpages, where body text usually resides. In such positions they are in the direct eyesight of all webusers, including those who have adopted banner blindness - how long is it before text adverts start to loose their effectiveness? Only time will tell, and at the speed at which the internet moves along, that's not very long.

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