Don’t Use Rotating Banners for Your Medical Device Website

“Our themes don’t have sliders… Because sliders suck.” Yoast

How many rotating banners do you currently have on your homepage?

The typical client wants many banners on the homepage of their website.

“Our themes don’t have sliders… Because sliders suck.” Yoast

How many rotating banners do you currently have on your homepage?

The typical client wants many banners on the homepage of their website. Having no rotating banners (or sliders), they say, means that the site is boring and anachronistic. They are concerned that this will give visitors the impression that their medical device isn’t innovative (yeah, gobbledygook) or exciting.

But here’s the fact: Rotating banners don’t work. They are counterproductive in almost every way and will hurt your marketing communication. Here is why you should be brave and ditch banners for your existing (or next) medical device website:

#1 Hardly anyone clicks on them

Click-through rates were found to be a lot less than 1% on banners that appear on homepages of websites. Of these, 89.1% of the original 1% clicked on the first image they saw. What this means is that only 10.9% of clicks were performed on all other images combined. Just 1 in 1000 people will click on a second banner. A study by Search Engine Land showed that in around 800,000 homepage views, click-through rate was extremely low:

#2 They look like advertisements, so no one notices them (aka “Banner Blindness”)

Rotating banners look like ads. And people ignore ads, a phenomenon known as banner blindness. Now that you know that, what would the logic be for having many banners running in sequence? If you want to read more, read Neilsen Group’s finding on banner blindness. They use heat maps to prove their point.

#3 They take a long time to load. And doctors are impatient.

The average time a person spends on a website is less than 7 seconds (and some studies show less than 3). The more information you want your visitors to see, the longer will it take for the website to load. Now, imagine that a hospital administrator is using a mobile device to view your site. Images, which take longer to upload than text, are uploaded while the site is being resized to fit the display (if it’s a responsive site).Chances are that the administrator won’t wait for the second message to come up.

#4 Rotating banners decrease readability

Studies have shown that site’s visitors may not read as fast as you thought. When the Nielsen Group tested a rotating accordion-type banner on their focus group, they received comments like this: “I didn’t have time to read it. It keeps flashing too quickly.” I see sites that have three banners, with the images in those banners changing every second. What is the chance that a doctor viewing this will really have time to properly see what you have to say and absorb your messages?

#5 They frequently aren’t seen properly on mobile

A study by Google about how medical products are researched online by Hospital Administrators, showed that administrators use mobile in 50% of cases when searching for and learning about medical new medical technologies. Sliders are usually not mobile-friendly. Images that were spread nicely on the screen of a desktop become dramatically decreased in size. Text becomes tiny. The message you worked so hard to craft becomes virtually nonexistent.

#6 Sliders are not good for your ranking on search engines

Load time is the name of the game and is an important factor in Google’s algorithm. Slow load time can lead to bounces, which hurt your search rankings. You can almost hear the doctor clicking on the “back” button even before the site is loaded and properly seen. And this means that your bounce rate is high, which may hurt your search ranking.

You should really let go of multiple banners on your website

Always remember that your marketing communication should focus on helping the prospect focus on what is important. This doesn’t matter if the prospect is a doctor, investors, hospital administrator, or patient. Many banners are simply clutter, which you should remove from your site. Focus on an important single message that you would like to share with your audience, mainly about what your medical device does and its top benefits. You should give physicians and hospital administrators a reason to continue browsing the site rather than clicking the “back” button.

don’t use banners / shutterstock