Use of graphic images and text characters in web banners

Participants were presented with a list of web banners and asked to perform a series of matching tasks to test the effectiveness of graphic images, as compared with verbal characters, in website banners for e-marketing purposes. Participants studied ten different web pages. The web banners consisted of images or characters that had some degree of linkage to the corresponding web contents. Results show that: (i) participants have a greater ability to match web contents if banners are relevant to the web page contents; (ii) contextual cues can be enriched by the context of the images used in the web banners; (iii) frequent web surfers are less likely to recall web banners than normal web users. These findings are discussed in the light of research on the effect of ‘picture superiority’ and ‘semantic coding’ on memory of pictures and words. Several significant interactions among those factors were also observed, and these extend earlier research in psychology and e-marketing. The implications of the results are discussed and future research directions are suggested.