Main conference presentation

Testing for advertising effectiveness

Margaret Hanley

Sunday April 13 2008, 10:15 - 11:00AM

Many times we do user testing to ensure that a site we have designed meets the needs of the users to find information or interact with an application- we want it to be usable and useful. The advertising placed on the site is an afterthought and usually placed in the design as unobtrusively as possible.

What if the role of user research was to identify how far the organisation could go when it came to placing advertising on the site? If the goal of the user research was to ensure that it did not negatively impact the users or reduce the brand values of the site? How does that affect the way user research is performed and the recommendations made back to the client?

Taking lessons learnt from working with government organisations in the UK, I will discuss how advertising user testing differs from normal user testing; from how to meet the testing goals to the choice of advertising models and the way we develop scripts. I will also discuss how the reactions of the users in the testing (focusing on the advertising and the brand) can be generalised and applied to web sites considering applying advertising.