Banner Usability

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by Pete Cooper

We all love to hate them, but every year since their debut banners have become less effective. This has caused the price of advertising on the Web to topple. Meanwhile, the total amount of pages to advertise on has increased exponentially. This has caused advertising revenues to drop considerably for many companies.

While we can, quite reasonably, blame the ever increasing amount of advertising space for the sliding effectiveness of banner ads, there's a number of other factors. Cheif among which is banner usability, which looks at why people click on links, how they click on them, why they might choose not to click on them, and how easy the ads are to use.

Before we can examine what affects the usability of a banner, we need a way of measuring how successful a banner is. After all, if you can't measure the effects, then how do you know when things are working?

The success of a banner is usually measured by its click through rate (CTR). This is either displayed as a ratio or percentage that depicts how many people have clicked on the banner compared to those who have viewed it. For example, if a banner is displayed 20 times and 1 person clicks on it, this is a 20:1 ratio, or 5%. Naturally, the higher the percentage the better.