How to Make a Scroll Stopping Banner: Every Element, Measured

In 2005 researchers sat 24 people in front of an eye tracker. Some pages carried a real advertising banner. Some carried a blank grey rectangle in the same slot. People looked at the real ads in 13.0% of the tasks and at the empty grey box in 8.8%, a gap small enough to have been luck. I make small apps (Repeat Recorder, Paint Vlix, Camera to Clipboard) and buy ads for them, so what I wanted was the short list of banner tips somebody has actually measured.

Where a banner sits matters more than how it looks

• A banner inside the content was looked at almost six times as often as one in a slot at the top.
• Readable words get a banner looked at more than a picture does. A study of 1,363 print ads found that making the text bigger lifted attention to the whole ad, while making the picture or the logo bigger just took attention away from the other parts.
• Animating a banner wins the click and loses the paying customer, so animation is a trap rather than a tip.
• A face on a banner changes nothing unless the face is looking at your product.

So: fight to get the ad into the column people are reading rather than into an ad slot, put words on it, leave it still, and if you use a face, point it at the thing you are selling.

A finished ad is barely noticed more than an empty box

The best numbers on whether anyone looks at a banner come from Burke, Hornof, Nilsen and Gorman, in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2005, who eye-tracked 24 people looking for things on a web page with either an advertisement or an empty grey box in the banner slot.

• In the 2005 eye-tracking study, a real advertisement in the banner slot was looked at in only about one search in eight, and the gap between an advertisement and an empty box was small enough to be luck.
• When a banner did get looked at, it was almost always an accident on the reader's very first glance at the page.
• Putting any ad on the page made people slower to find what they came for. Finding an easy target took 2,040 milliseconds with an empty grey box, 2,169 with a static ad and 2,193 with an animated one.

One caveat: the 2005 banner study tested 24 undergraduates searching a page in 2005, not someone scrolling a feed in 2026.

Almost nobody looks at the ads placed at the side of a page

People have learned where ads normally sit, and their eyes now skip those places without them deciding to. Nielsen Norman Group put 26 people in front of real web pages and tracked exactly where they looked.

• The strip of ads placed at the right-hand side of a page filled a quarter of it and got fewer than one look in a hundred. No redesign closes a gap of fewer than one look in a hundred, so move the ad out of the right-hand strip instead.
• People skipped real articles too, purely because those articles sat where ads normally go.
• Eight looks in ten land on the left half of the screen and only two on the right. The spot on a page that gets the most looks is about 600 pixels in from the left edge.
• The old rule that 80% of viewing happens before you scroll is out of date, and the real figure is 57%. The old 80% figure for viewing before you scroll came from 2010, when screens were small.

Use Camera to Clipboard to test a banner in the real page

A design tool shows you the banner without the page around it, yet where the banner sits is the largest effect anyone has measured. On a phone, a screenshot shows the banner inside its real page. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, moves a phone screenshot onto your computer in one step.

• Camera to Clipboard sends several pictures from your phone's library at once, so screenshots of three candidate placements arrive on your computer together, ready to paste with no cable and no upload.
• The same banner was looked at 58 times among the content and 10 times in a fixed slot at the top, so the choice worth testing is the slot rather than the artwork.
• Pasting a phone screenshot from Camera to Clipboard into Photoshop or GIMP drops the page screenshot in as a new layer, so you can slide the banner around the page and see where it lands.

Trying to stand out is exactly what gets a banner skipped

On a web page, looking different from what surrounds you is precisely how a banner gets skipped.

• Nielsen Norman Group's stated reason that readers ignored an element was that it "looked different from the text and the photography on the site".
• Sponsored posts in a realistic Instagram feed were looked at 23% fewer times than organic posts, even though they were built to look like the posts around them. A 2025 study of 152 people in Frontiers in Psychology recorded 5.00 looks at a sponsored post against 6.52 at an organic one.
• The call-to-action button gives away that a post is an ad more strongly than the word "Sponsored" does.
• The "Sponsored" label on an Instagram ad has to stay, so the parts you can actually change are the colours, the photography, the typography and the layout.

Animation buys attention and loses you the customer

• Studies disagree on whether animating a banner raises attention at all. A 2004 study found animated banners beat static ones on attention, recall and attitude, while a 2010 study concluded that "on average, animation had little or no effect on attention".
• In the 2005 eye-tracking study, people remembered some of the still banners and remembered nothing whatsoever of the animated ones. In that 2005 study by Burke and colleagues at the University of Oregon, answers about the animated banners were no better than if people had picked at random.
• Video Facebook ads win more clicks than still image ads, and lose on the cost of each paying customer. Across 67,000 Facebook ads, video beat static on click-through by 1.9% to 1.1% while costing $48.20 per customer against $34.50.
• Banners with flashing text were the worst kind of banner for slowing people down. When something people were looking for sat between two flashing banners, it took them 75% longer to find.

If you are paying per customer rather than per click, the cheap change is deleting the animation.

Plain text gets looked at more than a picture

• A 2023 eye-tracking study of 67 people found text banners were skipped less often and remembered better than picture banners. The 2023 study of text and picture banners was published in Cognitive Processing, a cognitive science journal.
• Nielsen Norman Group have listed plain text since 2007 as one of the few things that reliably pulls a gaze into an advertisement.
• Benway and Lane, the Rice University researchers who named banner blindness, found in 1998 that a plain highlighted text item inside a menu did not trigger banner blindness at all, while banner-shaped elements did. Making something stand out worked when it sat inside the text people were reading, and stopped working the moment the same emphasis moved into a banner.

Bold text is the cheapest change you can make to a banner

• In printed phone directories, setting an entry's words in bold got it looked at 42% more often, which beat paying to print the whole advert in colour. Bold added 42% more looks at no extra cost, while colour added 21%.
• Meta still advises keeping image text under 20% and still publishes no data supporting it. The old Meta rule that rejected ads with more than 20% of the image covered in text was quietly retired in September 2020.
• The 125-character and 27-character limits in Meta's ad guide only mark where Meta cuts the text off, and are not performance findings.
• Nobody has tested what colour the text on a banner should be. Make banner text easy to read against whatever sits behind it.

So for the words on a banner: use words rather than a picture, set them in bold, make them readable, and ignore Meta's 20% text rule.

A face works only when it is looking at your product

• A static face did not make people any likelier to look at the banner than no face at all. Researchers Palcu, Sudkamp and Florack eye-tracked 137 people across banners with a face looking at the product, a face looking away, and no face.
• A face with its gaze pointed at the product made a look at that product 4.1 times likelier. A face on a banner staring out at the camera wastes that gaze effect.
• The direction a face on a banner is looking changes whether the eye lands on your product, not how long it stays there.
• A face on a banner steals about two and a half times the attention the product gets, even when the face is looking at the product. People looked at the face for 670 milliseconds against 270 for the product.
• The famous eye-tracking study of a baby's face in an ad that everybody cites was a blog post, never peer reviewed. James Breeze, now head of the eye-tracking agency Objective Experience, first posted his test of 106 people on his own blog in 2009.

How big your banner is beats how much it stands out

• How big something on an ad is predicts where people look about twice as well as how much it stands out. A review of 19 eye-tracking studies found each extra increase in size adds less attention than the one before, so small increases help more than large ones.
• In eye-tracking studies of photographs, what a thing means predicts where people look better than how much it stands out. In a 2018 Journal of Vision study by Henderson and Hayes, meaning explained 50% of the variation in where people looked, against 35% for how much things stood out.
• A computer model that simply guesses "people look at the middle" outperforms the standard visual-contrast model. Any tool selling you a heat map of what stands out in your banner predicts looking worse than simply assuming the middle.
• Cramming in more detail, edges and colours measurably hurts attention to your brand. Across 249 advertisements, a deliberate, well-organised layout helped attention to the brand instead.

Which colour you pick has never been shown to matter

• The one colour decision with real evidence behind it is taking your colours from the page you sit on. Nielsen Norman Group named a coloured background as one of the tells that marked an element out as an advert.
• The claim that "red converts best" comes from a button test where the losing green button was the client's own brand colour. In that test, the green button blended into a page that used green throughout.
• The two famous statistics claiming colour decides how people judge a product were both made up. The claim that up to 90% of what someone thinks of a product comes from its colour traces back to one unreferenced sentence. The claim that colour increases brand recognition by 80% traces back to a Xerox marketing leaflet.

So use enough contrast inside the banner that the words are easy to read, and stop worrying about which colour that is.

You get 1.7 seconds, so design for a single glance

Facebook published the number everyone quotes, in April 2016: people spend 1.7 seconds with a piece of content in a mobile feed against 2.5 seconds on desktop. The 1.7 second figure is a vendor claim with no published method, and it is still the best public figure there is.

• Making the banner taller does not buy it a single extra millisecond on screen until it passes twice the screen height.
• The only two things that change how long your banner is on screen are the reader's scroll speed and their screen height. Neither the reader's scroll speed nor their screen height is something you control from the design file.

So build the banner for one glance: one idea, in words big enough to read without stopping, and no second thing competing with the first.

Only one in four people stop three seconds on a video ad

"Scroll stopping" does have a real unit. On Meta it is the hook rate, the share of people shown a video ad who stay for three seconds. Billo, a platform that connects brands with creators who make ads, measured the hook rate across more than 80,000 Meta video ads between July and December 2025.

• The average hook rate for Meta video ads, the share of viewers who stay three seconds, was 24.42% across every industry, and it barely moved from July to December 2025.
• Exactly one industry in one month broke a 30% hook rate on Meta video ads, which was health and beauty in December at 30.56%. The advice that a 30% hook rate is merely solid and 40% is elite describes results that no industry average reached in Billo's data.
• The gap in average hook rate between the best and worst industry was 8.5 percentage points, from health and beauty at 28.34% down to pet supplies at 19.80%.
• Across 578,750 Meta ads and $1.29 billion of spend, only about 5% became winners, with at least 10 times their account's typical ad spend. In the count by Motion, an ad analytics tool, those few winning Meta ads soak up 55% of all the money spent.

Use Repeat Recorder to try twenty openings for a video ad

A different opening sentence is the cheapest new attempt at a video ad. Repeat Recorder, another of my own apps, records you, plays the take straight back and starts recording again without you touching the phone.

• Repeat Recorder replays each take and then starts recording again on its own, so twenty different opening lines take a few minutes and no button pressing.
• Only about 5% of Meta ads became winners that drew far more spend than the rest, and those few soaked up 55% of all the money spent, so the number of attempts you can afford matters more than the polish of any one of them.
• In Repeat Recorder, takes worth keeping go into favourites and into folders you name yourself, which you can drag into whatever order you want.

A third of display ads never get onto the screen at all

• The ad industry counts a banner ad as seen when half of it is on screen for one whole second, and that is the entire test. Nothing in the ad industry's standard requires that a human eye ever moved toward the ad.
• Only 67.9% of banner ads got half their pixels on screen for one second in July 2026, so about a third never cleared the bar at all. Integral Ad Science, an ad verification company, measured that figure across more than 300 billion daily interactions.
• Banner ads on phones browsing the web are the worst on every measure, with 64.5% getting half on screen for one second against 71.6% on desktop.
• Lumen Research, an ad attention research company, finds around 70% of the ads that do get half on screen for one second are still never actually looked at.
• The best place on a page for a banner is just above the point where you have to start scrolling, not the very top. Google found 68% of ads were properly on screen above the point where you start scrolling, against 40% below it.

Tall banners stay on screen and wide ones scroll away

Meetrics, an ad verification company, measured how often each banner size was properly on screen, and for how long, across several billion ads shown in Europe.

• Tall banners beat wide ones both at staying on screen and at getting clicked, because they survive the scroll. The 970x250 billboard is physically the largest unit in the table and has the shortest time in view of any of them, which rules out "bigger is better" as the explanation.
• Which device the ad runs on changes click-through about four times more than which size you pick. Desktop banners were clicked 0.051% of the time and mobile banners 0.209%.
• Google's list of "top performing" ad sizes is about advertiser demand and publisher earnings, in Google's own words, not about clicks.
• Sitting too far down the page accounted for 41% of ads that were never properly on screen, and being there too briefly accounted for another 22%.

Everyone quotes 0.46% but the real banner click rate is 0.27%

The most quoted statistic in banner advertising is roughly double the real figure, because it is a measurement from 2017 being passed off as current.

• The famous 0.46% display click-through rate is WordStream data collected between August 2017 and January 2018. WordStream, an online advertising software company, has a 2026 "last updated" stamp on that page, which is how it keeps getting cited as current.
• The best recent figure for a banner click rate is 0.27%, barely more than half the 0.46% everyone still quotes. The 0.27% banner click rate covers the second quarter of 2024 and comes from advertisers reporting their own results.
• Every "2026 click-through by ad size" table circulating online is the same 2017 platform dataset with a new date put on it.

So the number to plan against is about a quarter of one percent: if a thousand people are shown your banner, expect two or three clicks.

Banner blindness got worse and now hits anything ad-shaped

• Nielsen Norman Group have documented banner blindness in 1997, 2007 and 2018 and call it strong and robust with no sign of weakening. While banner blindness held steady, the share of ads that were properly on screen went from about half in 2014 to roughly two thirds today.
• Banner blindness has widened from advertising to anything that merely looks like advertising or sits next to it. The banner blindness reflex is triggered by an ad's shape and location, which is why moving the ad helps more than redrawing it.
• The most-cited banner blindness number in existence rests on six people. Benway and Lane's result, that people succeeded on 58% of tasks needing a banner click against 94% on ordinary ones, came from a pilot with six participants.
• Benway and Lane refused to conclude that people never see banners, which is the claim their study is usually cited for.

Conclusion: what actually makes a banner scroll stopping

• Where the banner sits decides more than anything you can draw on it. The same banner was looked at 58 times when it sat among the words people were reading and 10 times in a fixed slot at the top.
• Making a banner look eye-catching backfires, because readers skip whatever looks like an advert. A fully designed advertisement was looked at 13.0% of the time against 8.8% for a blank grey rectangle.
• Set the words in bold, delete the animation, and point any face at your product, because those are the cheapest changes with real measurements behind them. Which colour you pick has never been shown to matter.