When you’re building a website, you have to take on the perspective of your visitors. The ultimate goal is to build a site that surfers will want to recommend to their friends by passing along links and bookmarks.
Sometimes, even the big time websites forget this one and go overboard with the advertising.
In this case, I’m talking about a flashing advertisement on CNN.com (you might still be able to see it for a while)
Here’s a great example of what not to do, because I’ve already seen how visitors react to such an ad in real time. “What the..” “That flashing is incredibly annoying..”
And before you know it, your surfers have had to click AWAY from your website just to escape the ads. At that level of color and frequency, its just a matter of time before you click something to get away from the annoyance – or you’ll end up with a headache.
Now, these are the types of advertisements that inspire people to install advertisement blockers. Normally, I think people should at least view the ads on a site in case they’re interested, but if I ended up on a lot of websites with annoying ads like these, I might even break down and install one myself.
Here are the worst ads you can ever put on your website IMO:
Flashing Graphics
Its annoying to everyone, and its downright cruel to people who easily get headaches and dizziness. Maybe you think all the action and activity is going to make more people click on it, but let me tell you I’m going to hit the “Back” button on my browser as fast as I can
Auto-Play Audio/Video
There’s a good chance I Just won’t hear any audio because I usually don’t have my headphones on unless I’m listening to music or on Ventrilo. And if I have the headphones on, I don’t want to be “surprised” by sudden blasts of noise I wasn’t expecting.
Pop-Ups
I almost forgot about these because I’ve been using Firefox with the popup blocker. Every once in a while one sneaks through, so I do remember how annoying they are. Most companies will ban publishers that cause their ads to pop up, but some of the shadier ones couldn’t care so long as they get their impressions. This is probably a pretty bad sign as far as the quality of the products and services they’re selling… And at the very least, its something that causes me to lose a bit of trust in the site I’m visiting.
False Promises
This is on my mind since the last post about make money systems and get rich quick schemes. There’s a lot of products out there “for sale” that are really nothing but a clever marketing campaign. Anything that falls into the category of “too good to be true” like money for nothing or a pill that claims you can eat two pizzas a night and lose weight.
In and Overlapping Content
This is the holy grail of getting people to click on your ads, but I think there are a few good rules before mixing ads in with the main page copy. Only do this when:
- the content is about the product in question
- the advertising is informative and describes what the company offers
- AND you can be realistic about pointing out the faults and limitations of the product
In the short term, you might see some extra clicks as people are misled or annoyed into clicking, but if you trick them they’re unlikely to make a purchase from you and if they’re annoyed they’re unlikely to recommend the site to anyone.
Any website that doesn’t get recommendations and viral marketing from its surfers is not living up to its potential, so keep this in mind when you’re deciding how to ultimately maximize the monetization of your website.
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