Knowledge Bridge

//Peter Whitehead /June 15 / 2012

Clean design gives ads more impact

Too much clutter on your website is a turn-off for advertisers as well as readers, says research from SAY Media and IPG Media. Ads on clean webpages are “more useful, trusted and effective”, the research showed. Carefully placing fewer ads on a page creates a more positive impact on advertiser and site perception than cluttering the design with ads from multiple brands.

With the time visitors spend on each page decreasing in many countries – down to 40 seconds per page according to comScore – advertisers want to be sure their ads are getting maximum attention. For news publishers, the temptation is to place more and more ads on the page because the yields are so low, yet for advertisers the returns fall dramatically.

You can test your own site with a free clutter test – just add a webpage address, click the test button and the algorithms calculate how cluttered your page is. With results ranging from 16% (Google) to 86% (Yahoo), the test creators say you should aim for a score of below 50. Anything more than that and readers are likely to miss important links and may spend less time on the page.

Clearer, easier to read websites are definitely in demand by audiences. Services like Flipboard, the iPhone app that takes pages with any amount of clutter and delivers it in a clean magazine lay-out, have built their business on the appeal of uncluttered design.

The research also showed that website users spend twice as long on pages featuring ads from a single advertiser and that cleaner design delivers higher ad recall.

Key findings:

• Clean pages enhance ad and site perception: Uncluttered sites are seen as more useful and more trusted; ads on these sites are more engaging.
• Ads are always seen in a clean setting: Eye-tracking technology showed that 100% of respondents viewed ads on clean pages, compared to only 76% on cluttered, multi-advertiser pages.
• Dwell time increases on clean sites: Those who saw ads in a clean environment spent 6.4 seconds viewing it, compared to 3.2 seconds on cluttered pages.
• Less clutter means higher recall: The cleaner the design, the higher the ad recall.

Think about this research when you’re designing your website. And when you speak with advertisers you can use this research and a clean design as a selling point and as a way to differentiate yourself in the market.

Article by Peter Whitehead