Does Anybody Pay Attention To Banner Ads
By Daya Baran at March 25, 2008 9 Comments|
That is the billion dollar question being asked by ad executives everywhere according to a report by Ad Age. They are finally realizing that no one pays attention to online banner ads. Banner ads offer web publishers a means to monetize their traffic but the report questions how long it can last. Advertisers will realize that they are not getting the bang for their buck as they hoped and will find alternative ways to achieve their goals than banner ads. TechDirt suggests that Advertising Is Content and Content Is Advertising and offers the following recommendations for “brand” marketers who are starting to worry about the effectiveness of banner ads. 1. The captive audience is dead. There is no captive audience online. Everyone surfing the web has billions of choices on what they can be viewing, and they don’t want to be viewing intrusive and annoying ads. They’ll either ignore them, block them or go elsewhere. |
Tags:
content, engagement, Online Advertising, Social Media
9 Comments
If no one is paying attention then explain why major retailers can track clicks to sales and turning off online advertising results in a DRAMATIC drop in traffic and online sales. You think a web monkey is doing this. People stopped by attention to TV years ago and that didn’t slow the sale of commercial units. Get over it. “Banner ads” are real, measurable and drive engagement, awareness and sales.
I really cannot believe you took the time to actually write this. If noone is paying attention to banner ads than i guess the measurement and engagement are just not real, and the increased budgets from year to year is just a rumor. Oh and these marketers buying online media are not smart… lets se, they are pulling budgets offline and putting it online… What about the data that shows a direct Corelation from banners to search quieries? We all know many search queries come from some other form of media, research and tracking support this.
i would love to hear your theory on offline advertising… With Tivo and DVR’s who is actually watching an ad on TV.
People who believe noone see’s a banner ad just don’t get it and should continue to live under the rock living in the past. I consider you guys a VCR or even a betamax.
Yeah, what’s wrong with you?
I get so tired of getting e-mails from visitors BEGGING for crap in their faces.
They often say, “Distract me and waste my time more! That’ll bring me back!”
Long live the 2 percent clickthrough rate!
And to hell with the other 98 percent of visitors.
Hey, let’s bring back heavy rotations of pop-ups, too.
Visitors LOVE those!
Banner ads do have a place but it comes down to the level of relevance and importance and interesting-ness of the message.
However, I do agree that an advertiser can’t lazily buy banners and expect impact. It takes time, creativity, research, and the attempt to craft a unique message for the audience.
I do certainly agree that you can’t separate content from advertisements and have impact. Because of that, like any ad format, you can’t play a numbers game with banners – if you annoy 1 million people you’ll have 1 million people not pay attention.
I can’t speak for others, but I can speak for myself. I ignore banner ads. The web is truly an on demand environment. I take what I need and the rest if ignored.
This article leaves me wondering if there any point? it seems a bit un-helpful (i won’t go as far as to say useless, but does seem it was written in 5 minutes)
These comments hilarious, thank you all for your vastly differing responses. The way I read this is that the point the article is making may not be that Banner Ad’s do not work. Truth be told, they do in many instances, is it as easy to get high click through rates as it was before? Maybe not, but does that mean Banner Ad’s do not work? Of course not, they do, when they give the RIGHT message. If you can not place a full articel or a few paragraphs of text on someone eleses website, you may very well be restricted to a banner. Do you STUFF IT FULL OF INFO, no way, you get creative, and create great content for that banner space. Which goes right back to what the article is saying, when they have the right content matched with the right visitor sales will happen.
Over $10B in M&A deals are a pretty strong indication that banners, and more importantly, the data derived from clicks, really do matter and are pretty valuable.
Well as a former ISP operator during the .COM boom and now an operator of a couple of very busy sites that use ads, I can tell you this.
My eCPM is down 75% since the fall.
The click-through rate has not changed.
Traffic continues to ramp at both locations.
Now one of two things must be true:
1. Google is keeping more and more of the money, which means that their model is going to implode. In fact, the eCPM has done a stair-step right at their earnings release dates – three times – all three times downward – and has never recovered. What do you think that means?
2. Advertisers are coming to the conclusion that the ads are worthless (or just plain worth less) and thus are paying less. This reflects of course in the amount available. But then how did Google report what it did tonight? Oh wait – go see #1 for how that happened.
Hmmmmm……