Online ad banners: the effects of goal orientation and content congruence on memory.

Banner blindness, the phenomenon that the user will consciously or unconsciously ignore online banners while navigating a certain website, is a big problem for marketers and has been studied in the past. We present a study that tests the hypothesis whether the user's memory (free recall and recognition) is influenced by the user's goal orientation during navigation on a website and whether it is mediated by the correspondence of the banner content and website content (congruence). Participants in an explorative orientation show better memory for banners than users in a broad or narrow goal orientation. No differences between the congruent and incongruent conditions with regard to recall measures were found but the congruent condition yields slightly better recognition rates. Based on these findings further implications and research possibilities are discussed.