“Clutter is killing digital media,” said Troy Young, president, SAY Media. “Publishers keep adding more and more ads, because yield is becoming so low, and ads aren’t in view long enough to really drive results, leading to incredibly cluttered web pages."
The study involved 3200 internet survey respondents who were exposed to one of four sites and one of four advertising environments. Eye tracking data was collected using GazeHawk's proprietary technology among a subset of 200 respondents. The study was conducted with four major brands across multiple industries: ACE, Macy’s, Microsoft and Purina.
The eye-tracking data found that all respondents viewed ads on web pages with a clean and sparse layout. On a cluttered, multi-advertiser page, only 76 per cent viewed the ads. And on websites with multiple ads for the same advertiser with complete share of voice, 89 per cent of respondents viewed the ads.
Furthermore, those who saw ads in a clean environment spent 6.4 seconds with the ad, versus 3.2 seconds on cluttered pages. According to comScore, the average time spent on a page of a website is steadily decreasing, with users spending only 40 seconds on a single page, making it imperative for brands to be smarter about advertising.
Both aided and unaided ad recall were higher in a clean environment than in either a cluttered multi-ad page or a multi-ad page with 100 per cent share of voice.
"In a fully mediated world, consumers have many more choices competing for their attention,” said Brian Monahan, IPG Media Lab. “The amount of attention on a web page is relatively fixed, and clean ads are garnering more attention than those on cluttered pages."
