Interacting with your Visitors

Helping the User find what they want

The first thing to recognize is the nature of the web itself. It is generally information rich but content poor. Most web surfers are internet savvy. They know that they may well have to visit several websites to glean the information they're looking for. As a result they tend not to examine a particular website in detail. Rather they 'graze' a particular site looking for specific keywords so that the particular information they're looking for can be sought-out.

There's a tug-of-war happening at the moment between the needs and desires of webmasters and website owners who want surfers to stay on their website as long as possible and the needs of the surfers themselves who want quick access to a piece of information or a service so that they can move on somewhere else. If these opposing needs are skewed too far in favour of the web designer your user may become so fed-up with your site that they never visit it again. From the viewpoint of the web-designer, it may sound counter intuitive: however, actually helping the user find what they want so that they can leave quickly may actually significantly improve return traffic to your site. If you arrange each web page with easy sub-titles and an obvious key to the main sections whilst providing easily navigable sitemaps and site search systems will make them feel comfortable on your site.

The truth is that even though our societies have changed significantly we humans are basically the same as we were a thousand, two thousand, five thousand years ago. We still live in tribes composed of our families and our nearest neighbours or friends: with a circle of close relationships that's generally little more than 150 people. We have evolved to deal with other people on a personal level. We need to know other people so that we can grow to trust them. Providing easy and consistent navigation on your site helps this aspect of 'trust'. So that people believe you are trying to help them rather than trying to help yourself. Your site will, as a result, become an information resource that they will come back to again and again. This interaction with your visitor, gaining their trust and giving them reasons to come back to your site, is far more important than trying to trap them into your site on a single visit. This is why you should develop your own 'voice' on your site. Make it individual, use your own writing style so that your visitors know you and know you can be trusted. This way they will come to trust other aspects of your site, such as the advertising you're providing.

How we look at Websites and Why

By far the commonest form of advertising on the web today is the banner advert. This form of advertisement often combines animation, sophisticated graphics, and even audio to endorse product information. The effectiveness of such advertising being generally measured in terms of the 'click through rate' which is the ratio of the number of times an ad appears on a page compared to the number of times an individual clicks on the banner. The problem is that banner ads are great for the retailer but poor for the website owner. Analyses by Ipsos-ASI research shows that an internet banner is effectively equivalent to a 30-second TV advertisement in increasing overall user awareness of a brand by as much as 40%. So, 2/5 of your visitors will remember a brand from a banner advertisement after they leave your site but only 1 in every 100 will actually click on the banner. What you're really doing with banner advertising is providing the companies who display banners on your site with a lot of free advertising for very little personal gain.

Indeed, a study by Benway (Benway, J.P. (1998). Banner blindness: the irony of attention grabbing on the world wide web Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 42nd Annual Meeting, USA, 1, 463–467) demonstrated that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. If is from this study that the term Banner Blindness derives. Benway also found that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page (closer to other important links). This finding is supported by another study by Athenia Associates which showed a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1/3 of the way down the page.

How humans actually Look at Web Pages

Human beings are great apes. We share a close genetic relationship with chimpanzees and gorillas and we are slightly more distant relatives of the Orang utan. Our colour perception and our front-facing eyes giving us binocular vision are all part of our primate heritage. We evolved in colourful rainforests and colour vision is part of the background to our lives. The problem is that our vision is keyed to movement. This is why static colourful banners can be ignored easily, as they fade into the background of our visual surfing experience. This may explain why animated ads generally have a 15% higher click-through rate than static ads (as examined by ZDNet, 1996) and in some cases may have as much as a 40% higher rate. This is because motion against a colourful background speaks to the primate brain of danger; something we have to investigate to make sure it's not a threat.

If the investigation of movement is something that's hard-wired into our primate ancestry then writing, by comparison, appeared very late in human history Reading and writing doesn't come naturally to us, it's a learnt skill that's an effort to maintain (compare your attitude to spelling mistakes compared with mispronunciations if you don't believe me). Reading requires a conscious effort which is why recent investigations examining where an user's eyes track on a web page show that about 92% of the time is used-up in examining textual data as show in a Poynter Institute study of 2000.

This has led to the trend for using text-based advertisements with the same colour scheme and fonts as used in the main body of the text. This way the reader of the web page actually reads the text of the advertisement (or at least scans it) in the same way that they scan the remainder of the text. This has proved very effective, and in using it on my own site I have seen an almost 8-fold increase in click-through revenue (yes, that's right 800%) since movingtot text-based ads embedded within the text of the web page itself.

Knowledge is power, and once you know how people actually view your web pages and what works/doesn't work you can begin to alter your marketing strategies to make the most of your content. If you want to know more about this subject, then read my page on Internet Advertisig Effectiveness.