When was the last time you clicked on internet advertising? Do you notice clicking more than you did 5 years ago? Most conversations about internet advertising revolve around improving targeting and relevance to drive up click-through ratios. But I think there’s actually lot more we can do on the interactivity & design side to boost CTRs.

Users are trained to ignore ads not only because they are often irrelevant, but because clicking through is still too risky and disruptive.

Just leaving the current page is a significant disruption. You must wait for a new page load, spend 10-20 seconds understanding what you’re looking at, then decide whether or not it’s of interest to you. If you were to return to your old page, another 10-seconds is lost retracing the last activity/thought. Given the risk of not knowing what’s on the other side of the click, why bother leaving? We can do better by presenting information in layers, and as non-disruptively as possible to improve the comfort level of clicking through.

Judging a book by its cover is for books

The problem is that most ads have a 1-stage engagement process: you’re either not engaged (ignore ad) of fully engaged (leave current page via click-through), and that conversion rate is minuscule.

Ads generally show 1-3 messages and expect users to decide whether to fully engage based that limited quantity of information.

With Flash-based ads, especially in square-ish dimensions, we should be showing users interactive, and even useful widgets instead of conventional ads. If it’s an ad for media content, why not play samples? If the product or pitch is complex, why not unfold more information with the page?

I’m thinking something like Sprout or Apture is a good step in the right direction. For now, we would imagine the smallest measurable unit of attention being a single page view. But page views are too big, and too slow. Few action-units justify the level of disruption created by a page change. AJAX has done a great job with web applications, now lets bring that over to advertising.

Update: WidgetBucks does just this.