Banner ads – often placed on the right-hand side of a website – are prone to lose their effectiveness due to banner blindness. The current study investigated whether context congruency was able to increase the banner’s impact. Our study tested context congruencies (pictures or text elements or both) and their impact on awareness, retention, and attitude toward an advertisement. We used eye tracking to account for effects on visual attention relative to contact time and further information processing. Results indicated that complete context congruency including both visual and textual elements leads to higher visual awareness, better retention, and better attitudes toward the advertisement.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.