For years we've struggled to define every aspect of online advertising - the impression, the page view, the click - almost to no avail. But the one concept we could always describe fairly clearly was
clutter - too much stuff on a page. And that was simply bad news for ads. Not anymore. It looks like clutter just got complicated.
Apparently, there are now two kinds of it - "defined" clutter
and "perceived" clutter.
Dynamic Logic recently presented yet another study of the relationship between web page clutter and online ad effectiveness,
hoping to prove that increased clutter would be detrimental to the branding effectiveness of the advertising on that page.
To that end, they defined "clutter" in two ways: (1) "Defined clutter":
the number of elements on a web page, including graphics, text and other visual stimuli; one web page was chosen and altered to create three test environments: very, somewhat and not cluttered; and,
(2) "Perceived clutter": respondents were asked to rate the specific page they visited on how cluttered it felt to them. In all environments, multiple ads were tested to minimize creative biases
and isolate the variable of page clutter.
Predictably enough, the results showed that "Perceived clutter has more of an impact on ad effectiveness than Defined clutter." The research also showed
that different people define clutter differently. "Our Defined low clutter page felt very cluttered to some," the researchers said in their newsletter, "and vice versa: many people felt our Defined
high clutter page was not cluttered at all."
The moral of the story is really not as complicated as Dynamic Logic made it seem. When you're evaluating a site for an ad buy, if it LOOKS cluttered
- it IS cluttered, and clutter is still bad news for ad effectiveness. I'm not sure we needed a research study to figure that one out.