Is Anybody Seeing Your Ads?

I came across this great article by Janet Attard regarding advertisements. This has some great tips on ad placement and design.

Are you getting the response you hoped for from your advertising? If not, one factor affecting results could be where the ad is located on the page. Furthermore, the same ad in the approximate same page location in print and on a web page will not be equally visible. Here's why.

In printed publications, ads on a right-hand page usually get more visibility (because of the way people turn pages) than ads on left-hand pages. Ads in the center or outer edges of the right-hand page are more visible than those on the inner edge.

Ads near the front pages of a publication and in the back pages get seen more often than ads in the middle. Ads targeted at particular groups of people (computer users, for instance) are more likely to be noticed by potential customers if they appear on the same or opposite page as articles of interest to that group of people (a computer industry column, for instance) or in a publication dedicated to that particular audience.

In electronic media things work differently because people read online media differently. First, there is no left and right hand page. So the page-turning effect (ie, ads on the right catching attention as someone flips through pages) is missing. In fact, studies have shown that what most people look at first is the top left side of a web page. Then they scan across the top couple of lines from left to right.

Usually ads in the center of the page (i.e., in the center of the text people are reading) get more visibility than ads on the right side of the page.

In print, and online, though, the quality of the ad makes a huge difference in visibility and response. Color, text, and type size all come into play. So, a good ad on the right side of the page can out pull a badly designed ad in the center of the page.