“Just How ‘Blind’ Are We to Advertising Banners on the Web?”, 2000-07 (; backlinks):
…Moreover, 1998 showed that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. When participants in this study were asked to find specific information on a web page, the information was not found if it was embedded in a banner. Benway consequently named this phenomenon “banner blindness.” Benway also found that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page (closer to other important links). This finding is supported by another study which showed a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1⁄3 of the way down the page (Athenia 1997).
…In our study, we were curious to simply explore how much users remember about a web page after viewing it—in particular, we were interested in investigating user memory of banner advertisements:
How well can users’ recall a banner advertisement on a web page?
How well can users’ recognize a banner advertisement on a web page?
Does animation affect user recall or recognition of an advertising banner?
…Very few participants were able to complete both the recognition and recall tasks correctly. Only 3 (9%) of participants were able to correctly recall both advertisements, recognize both companies, and correctly recall and recognize the state in which they were presented. On the other hand, participants who were unable to recall anything for either company banner or correctly indicate the animation state of the banner (40%) had a surprisingly high recognition rate of 79% for two correctly recognized ads. Results also show that of the 26% who recognized only one ad, the banner recognized was typically presented in the animated state. In other words, 7⁄9 times the single banner correctly recognized was in the animated state. This indicates that animation may have some effect on recognition.
Results from this study indicate that recognition of the banner advertisements were fairly high (74% for both banners). In addition, about half of the participants were able to recall at least seeing an advertisement on the page—and many of these actually recalled the name of the company.
These results show that most users did notice and remember the banners even though they were not part of the search tasks they were performing.