# Effects of Visual Complexity of Banner Ads on Website Users' Perceptions
## 4 Discussion
While the difference in terms of perceived pragmatic quality was slight, the variance in hedonic quality was not negligible. Moreover, the difference in attractiveness, which could be deemed as the most crucial segment for our research, was substantial. [PERSON] et al. [11] found in their study that complex ads attracted people more towards evaluating the visual content. Although they attracted people's attention more, they were less liked by them according to the results of the questionnaire. From our perspective, this could result in a negative effect, as such ads may draw people to view content that is less appealing to them. The advertising strategy in designing online banners is, therefore, of great importance, as it needs to strike a balance between noticeably and likeability. By comparing the response rates and considering the research by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [18], an intriguing question emerged regarding the impact of emotional value. Despite the expectation that complex advertisements should hold more emotional value in the eyes of consumers, our survey revealed that respondents predominantly perceived them as more unprofessional, tacky, cheap and disagreeable compared to simple ads. This suggested that even if complex ads carried more emotional value, it tended to be negative emotional value. Such associations are undesirable for advertisers, as they may lead website users to link their products with negative emotions. After analyzing and interpreting all the results, we discovered that the visually complex ads were a better choice, solely if the main goal of the ad is to be noticed as soon as possible. Simpler ads were more appealing to users, less distracting and, above all, better affected their attention while browsing the websites. However, we along with most researchers agree that to fully comprehend the effectiveness of online banner ads, researching just the VC of ad design is not enough. When assessing ad campaigns, advertisers are interested in the performance of the ads themselves as well as overall visitor behavior on the website [30]. There are numerous important factors to consider, such as brand awareness [18; 31], the position and relation of the ad in regard to other elements on the website [32], presence of celebrities' photos [16; 33], etc. One of the major influences in researching the effect of advertisements is the familiarity with either the entire ad or just the brand present in the ad. A large share of advertisements on the market have a marketing strategy based on whether or not consumers already know the brand featured in the ad. In such cases, researchers may determine a test group composed only of participants who have sincerely judged that they meet the study condition (not being familiar with the brand present in it) but may in fact only meet it on a conscious level. It turns out that, because of this, humans are not best suited to subjectively determine the impact of VC on their own, as [PERSON] agrees [13]. Consequently, research studies that acquire data through objective methods, carefully designed under controlled conditions, such as our eye-tracking study, tend to hold greater significance in the field of advertising. Subjectively evaluated data, such as that acquired through questionnaires, is often considered less reliable due to challenges like self-definition, interdependence of answers and susceptibility to current emotional states. However, in our study testing the impact of VC of ads on web users, we found that survey questionnaire results could be trusted. This was attributed, in large part, to utilizing a questionnaire based on a model like ours, which minimized classic human biases in the evaluation. Our research indicated a clear correlation between objective and subjective evaluation methods with consistent and complementary results. While objective methods provide quantifiable and precise data, they may be raw and challenging to interpret.