Banner blindness
Today banners are a main part of home- and “landing pages”. However, most banners are completely ignored by the customers due to some very good reasons. Today our brains are so exposed to vast amounts of advertisement, that our subconsciousness automatically helps us weed out unnecessary information. If a banner looks to too much like an advertisement, there is a strong likelihood that the brain completely avoids looking at it - consciously or unconsciously. This is called ”banner blindness”.

If you carry out an eyetracking usability test, the output of the test is called a “heat map”. This heat map tells you, where the customer looks the most (the red hot spots), where the customer looks the least (the green, colder spots) and where the customer doesn’t look at all (the black areas).

Here is a good example of “banner blindness” from an eye-tracking test of the Virgin Megastore website:

When this eye-tracking test was carried out, Virgin ran a large scale sales campaign, however, none of the website’s visitors looked at it. This is due to the fact, that the red “Virgin Sale” banner looks too much like a banner / advertisement, which makes the customers’ subconscious mind rule it out as irrelevant content. This is a well kept secret for many people, and designers thus often don’t know of this problem. “Banner blindness” therefore is a massive problem at almost all e-commerce websites. They are stuffed with banners that convert badly, because few customers are looking at them.

How do I make people look at my banners? 
To avoid banner blindness at your website, you should try not to make your banners look like, well banners. Below is a banner from Tesco that most likely will be ignores by the customers:

Why might customers ignore this banner? The main reason is that the banner has a background color which is a classic banner design flaw. The background color “tells” the customer’s subconscious mind that the banner most likely is not relevant and then the mind immediately ignores it. Furthermore the text is blue on a blue background which makes the text blend into the visual impression of the banner – it should have had a contrast color to make it stand out. Finally the “Find out more” link is a way too subtle “call-to-action” link.

Stop designing “banners”
To avoid these problems at your website, you should stop designing banners that look too much like classic banners or 3rd party banners. Apple are masters at this. Their “banners” work, essentially because they do not look like banners – they are instead designed to look like relevant content:

These Apple banners have no or just a very light grey background color, which make them look as though they are an essential part of the website, which is the main reason why they actually work. They furthermore have a clear header and an equally clear “Learn more” link (Apple knows, that good old blue links still are the best way to catch the customers’ attention).

Follow these simple steps 
Make your “banners” convert much better at your website by:

• Not making the banners look like, well banners or third party banners / advertisements / content
• Using no (or a very, very subtle background) color
• Having clear headers that are easy to read
• Making call-to-action buttons or links very obvious

I hope this post has inspired you to improve your online “banners”? Please do feel free to comment! 

Only 2-3 % of your customers buy your products
The reason for this is, that only 2 – 3% of all the visitors at your website buy a product or a service (source). This is called your “customer conversion rate”, or just your “conversion rate”. 

Your conversion rate is calculated based on this formula:

Number of orders / number of unique visitors * 100 = conversion rate 

(Note: the conversion rate can also be calculated based on “visitors” or “number of visits”). 

It is all about the conversion rate   
My clients´ conversion rates are in the range of 0.5 – 13%. This large variation depends on which line of business they are in, which products they sell, the level of competition, etc.
Let’s say that your website’s conversion rate is 3%. This means that 97% of all the customers who visit your website do not buy anything. The reason for this often is due to poor usability.

A new AdWords customer will cost you 100 $
Based on this, you should think about how you spend your marketing budget. Should you invest in more (paid) traffic, or should you instead make it easier to shop at your website to get more orders? Well, let’s do the math. A company has the following data:

This company makes its website more user friendly and sales oriented. It improves its conversion rate from 2.75% to 2.90% – a 15% point increase, which is a very realistic scenario. Based on this, the company will improve its revenue by 545,459 $.

Let’s say you decide to buy more Google AdWords in order to get more traffic at your website. One click may easily cost you 3$ (and much more in some industries). Based on this click price, it will cost you 300 $ to attract 100 new visitors. If 3 of those 100 visitors buy a product from your website, it will cost you 100 $ to get one new customer. For most companies this will mean, that the company loses money the first a customer buys a product.

You would have to spend 1,091,001 $ on AdWords to get the same result
You must attract 363,667 more visitors to get the same revenue increase. At a cost of 3$ per AdWords click, this would cost you a staggering 1,091,001 $ to attract 363,667 visitors.

First of all, it is really bad business to spend 1,091,001$ to get a 545,459$ revenue increase. Secondly, you could get a state-of-the-art E-commerce website that will improve your conversation rate greatly for that amount of money.

Let’s assume that you can get a new E-commerce website for 200.000 $. This will mean, that you will have an approx. 5 times higher ROI (Return On Investment) rate if you improve your website, rather than paying for more traffic.

Is 97% of your marketing budget a waste of money?
Does this mean that 97% of your marketing budget is a waste of money? Not if you have few visitors at your website. No visitors, no revenue. However, if you have as many visitors as described in the above scenario, you should spend your marketing budget at making your website better at converting more visitors into buyers.

Have your done this calculation in your company? Feel free to comment!