Don't intrude - Customer is the King!!On one of the most visited and reputed News website in India, there pops up a banner ad on the homepage hiding the main headlines and that too just on page load, no clicks, no hovering required - it just shows up uninvited on the homepage as soon as it loads. How annoying?? How much effort does it take to realize that a visitor would come to a news website to check the latest headlines and not the latest banner ad. It is an excellent way of getting more impressions/views on the ad but an equally good way of leaving the visitors annoyed. Remember that the revenue from the ads is a byproduct of the content on the websites and users come to the website for content and not to give you impressions.
Learning: So make the ads less intrusive, keep them visible but separate from the content- which the core of your website. That will leave you happy customers and more revenue.
Keep it Consumer friendly
So this one is from a popular website which displays Cricket updates, I am a big fan of the cricket game and visit this website often to check the latest match scores. This, by the way, is a very nice website with very good and knowledgeable commentators who just don’t puke stats but actually tell them interestingly adding a personality of their own to the commentary. But here also somebody decided that they could get a lot of impressions and what better time to do that than during the IPL – Indian Premier League. So they placed the ad right over the score updates and placed other banner ad besides the site logo which hides the close button of the ad covering the score updates. The visitor is left with no option to close the banner ad and tries to click at the corner of the ad only to taken to a new page altogether. Very Very Frustrating!! It took me some time to figure out that if you scroll down the ad will move down with the scroll and then you can see the close button and close it. Why on earth do you want your users to go through all that pain? I was able to figure the way out the hard way yet decided to persist because I knew the content is good. But what about hundreds of new users who might be visiting your website for the first time, I bet they’ll leave in frustration never to come back again.
Learning: Don’t cramp too many ads into a small place, they won’t get you more revenue but only leave you frustrated users.
Give an Option to Opt-out
This is another example on yet another top news website. The ad in question is an excellent piece of creative work and I love it!! It’s sort of a green creeper/climber that grows leaf by leaf goes inside the computer screen tearing where the main news article is and then again appearing from another part of the article. Excellent graphic and extremely innovative but frankly I would have preferred it on a gaming website or on a website dealing with graphics, animations or something of that sort. But to have it on news website is a bad idea and then having it intrude on the content -the news article - is outrageous. Add to that that there is no ‘close’ button option so the visitor has to sit through the whole while - the graphic completes itself and disappears.
Learning: Give the visitors a break, respect their time. A user might have seen the ad before and he may not be interested in watching it again, give an option for him to skip it. And if the ads could be more contextual to the content on the website, nothing like it!!
Be persuasive, don't hound
Being persuasive is good but don’t hound the customer. This is related to a web hosting company’s ad. The ad first appeared on my own blog and I clicked it out of curiosity. I did what I wanted to do, checked for various webhosting options, their prices etc and then decided that I didn’t need one for now and came off the website. Every single day from that day onwards; the same ad hounds me on every third website I visit. It seems that when I visited that website it saved some kind of cookie on my browser and ever since then has been serving me customized ads (as they would like to believe!). Although this is just a guess, they might have used some other technique but what concerns me and puts me off is the constant hounding.
Learning: Remind the customer once a while maybe a month or a week but everyday is bit too much.
Appeal, don't shout
The last one is something you all might have faced, you are searching for a tutorial on advanced skills in Excel, you visit a link and suddenly you realize that a weight loss video has started playing automatically and what is worst that you didn’t have the mute on and you are in office and now everybody around you is staring at you . Video ads are great and provide a great opportunity to get the message across than static text ads but let the user be the judge if he is interested in your weight loss program. Why autoplay?? And even if you want to play the video, do some thing like what youtube does play the video without sound giving an option to the user to “Replay it with sound”. At least it would avoid the viewer some embarrassing moments.
Learning: Respect the user. Give him space and let him decide if he wants to view your ad or not.
Got some examples of annoying ads that you would like to share? Comments? Criticism?
