Dont Dress Up Calls-To-Action Like Google Adsense!
We’ve all heard of “banner blindness” – the phenomenon of completely ignoring anything that resembles an ad when surfing the website.
Image Source: Jakob Nielsen
For this reason you want to avoid sticking important links and calls to action in the right hand sidebar. You especially want to avoid colors and fonts that resemble typical paid search ads.
Home page
Product page
Silkfair product page
Same goes for navigation menus:
There are instances where even Internet Retailer 500 retailers really display Adsense on product pages:
I strongly believe reputable retailers should completely avoid paid search ads on their sites. But what’s worse, on Chapters Indigo, you can’t even distinguish the ads from the recently viewed products from the cross-sells because they use the exact same colors and fonts.
Further Reading
Yes, there is solid research to back this argument up. Thank you, Mr. Jakob Nielsen:
Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored
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I suspect Silkfair & Chapters Indigo are taking cues from Amazon in designing their product pages.
Obviously Amazon, who puts their “Add to Cart” buttons on the right, is doing a lot of things right. And putting the button there may make sense for some others, too. But it sure doesn’t feel like these two have done much testing on their product pages.
I can’t believe even Top 500 etailers are putting Google ads on their e-commerce sites. Why would you advertise competing products on your shopping site? I would only include ads on my site if it was just informational.
If you have real estate that can provide adequate search results and alternatives to the consumer, why not give them some contextual advertising?
Of course the majority of users’ eyeballs will be on the content of the page. This is a perfect example of measuring the wrong group of users. These test shouldn’t be run on users of the site, they should be run on people that land on those pages as a result of a search.
I’m confident that filtering the eye tracking to only those users who landed on the page from a search engine will produce a different result. It may not be significant, but even if it’s 1% – the ads may be a good choice.
I am redesigning my product pages right now, I am planning on putting a free shipping graphic, why buy from us?, and some testimonials in the far right column when I redesign my product pages….
Any problem with that?
Here is what it looks like…..
http://www.BibleBible.com/Audio-Bible/Catholic-Bible-on-CD.asp
Interesting. I just noticed the three boxes at the top of this screen.
I believe Indigo did that on purpose. Their thinking: “uuuuh, we can make google ads blend in and look like part of our site, thus look less like advertisting. And the best thing, people will click on it and earn us extra cash…in case cross sales and other sales won’t work b/c how confusing our site is..”
@Douglas Kerr
“If you have real estate that can provide adequate search results and alternatives to the consumer, why not give them some contextual advertising?”
The problem on ecommerce sites is that you often spend $1-$10 or more acquiring a customer, and if you’re using affiliate, paid search and email marketing, you don’t want to pay more to attract than what you can make by converting. Distracting visitors with relevant offers risks losing a sale for a fraction of AdSense revenue. You can’t even predict how much a click is worth – if Google Adwords takes $0.75 for the click you might make $0.25 (I’m guessing) when you could have made a $20.00 sale and $8.00 profit, for example.
@Audio Bible
Here’s a great resource for you, a recent webinar from Marketing Experiments all about testimonials – VERY good information.
I always take eye-tracking studies with a grain of salt. Where people look depends so much on what instructions they were given, and how and why they landed on the page.
Still, lots of good stuff in this post. Thanks!
One minor point: On the Chapters/Indigo page, I’d hardly say the ads and recently-viewed links share the “exact same colors and fonts”. Assuming I’m looking at the right page, the “links” are black and underlined; the ads is blue, black(non-underlined) and green.
Funny how this contradicts (as it should) the advice when optimizing your ads, of making them blend in with your overall site. The problem, especially with Adsense, is that the overall look of the ads is always the same – sites can only change the colors. Other ad networks give you greater flexibility for incoporating ads into the page.
I am surprised that Top 500 companies do this. But for smaller mom and pop stores, and particularly for sites that get a lot of traffic that is not necessarily looking to shop, I think ads can be quite helpful. But like everything, it needs to be tested – testing both the ad revenue and the product sales revenue. Relying on data from other sites can be helpful, but shouldn’t replace extensive testing of your own offers.
@Michael Straker
There are links for customer recommended products along the bottom that are the same font and color headlines as the AdSense.
@Miva
I have to disagree – I don’t believe there is any reason for AdSense on an ecommerce site. Certainly on content sites and even shopping comparison sites it has it’s place. But it doesn’t make sense on ecommerce sites when you could not only sell a product, but cross-sell products (larger orders) and create long-term customer relationships.
@Linda – I don’t think it’s useful on most ecommerce sites. However, we have one client in particular that I’m thinking of. She has a VERY niche product, and her site draws a lot of organic related traffic that has nothing to do with shopping. We believe that the majority of these people aren’t looking for products. She has carefully weeded out the few competitors that she has, so the ads don’t show any other products, just related services. We tracked the sales revenue and the ad revenue and were able to optimize both, and increase the overall value of her site as a result.
This is a very specialized case, however. Most of the other times we have people use it temporarily and then choose to remove it.
Good information. Those heat maps tell a story in itself.
Great post. I really liked those “thermal images”. Thanks for the awesome info!
I think the debate of retailers using AdWords on an eCommerce site vs. not is worth discussing. I can see scenarios, and we have a client that falls into this category as well, where it can make sense (retailing is only one aspect of their revenue model). Although I can say that this would be a very rare case. I was always surprised to see Buy.com and Amazon.com use Adwords so much on their sites when they basically sell everything under the sun anyways.
But regardless, if they are used, it should be very clear what’s an ad and what is not.
We are a lingerie retailer based in Italy and have had success using adsense as an extra revenue driver especially for the ‘just looking’ traffic. @eCommerce Consulting I have to agree, I was really surprised to see Amazon the gods of e-commerce running ads, maybe they have the same problem of alot of organic traffic that are not buyers or are just at the early phase of the sales cycle.
Linda, I knew I’d recently seen a big-name ecommerce site showing ads. I found it again – it was eToys. They sell lots of ads, but one in particular that caught my attention was a link out to the My Twinn website – a site that sells dolls. It’s a great example for your argument to not put ads on ecommerce sites. (In fact, there’s a lot of good examples of things not to do on this website!) Just thought I would share – I’d love to get your take on it. :)
@Miva
Looks like this is a banner exchange or a sister-site relationship. My Twinn does the same with a banner to eToys. I don’t mind banners etc. if you keep the visitor “in the family.”
Aha. I didn’t catch that. I wonder if the companies are related, in fact. Thanks for pointing that out.