Never Mind Banner Blindness - How About Image Blindness?

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Ever wonder why Google Adsense has been relatively successful? It usually features disgusting, ugly text links. How can that possibly perform better then a well-designed, message-full, impact-full banner?

Image Blindness. An epidemic more severe then the banner blindness I spoke about in a previous article. In some cases, buckets, or images used for internal marketing (that means, images to direct people within your own website), are sometimes completely overlooked by visitors.

Why? It’s an image, plain and simple. More and more, users are associating images with generic and useless fluff. Some eye-tracking studies demonstrate that images supplementing articles are often completely overlooked in favor of content. They’re given the same attention as web banners for competitors. Sure, some people do look at them, but not a lot of people.

If you’re looking to advertise internally using a graphic, the latter has to be integrated into your website using the same palette and general look and feel of your website. Your image will build credibility because it feels like it belongs to the website instead of being sourced from an outsider. Don’t bother making it “stand out”, if it’s relevant, it will be clicked.

What else can you do? Simple, boring, text links. Yawn. There’s not much you can do to pretty up text. Apart from emphasis and strong tags, your toolbox doesn’t feature much variety. But that’s not a problem. If it looks like a genuine link, users will click it if it’s relevant to their interests.

Hope that helps.