For most of my career, I’ve been challenged and/or heckled by someone asking/stating “Come on, those banners don’t work?!” or “Well, I never click on banners”. And I have steadfastedly stood by my graphic ad friends, because they do add value.
I’m not alone anymore! According to research published in the Journal of Consumer Research and more understandably discussed in an article by Science Daily, banner ads have an effect, even if you don’t notice them. Even when people cannot recall the ad, the repeated exposure to the ad leads to familiarity and that leads to positive feelings. The relationship between exposure and positive feelings is a direct one, with positive feelings increasing as exposure increased. This supports the value of using banner ads as part of your digitial branding strategy.
Another way in which banner ads get a bad rep, it through everyone judging their worth from their click-through rate. Sure, it’s one measurement, but it tells such a limited part of the story. I’ve always made the analogy that judging banners solely by their click-through rate is like Pepsi judging the effectiveness of their Super Bowl ads by the number of people who jumped out of their seat and immediately drove down to the store to buy some. There is just more to it. Since we started using a third-party ad server, we’ve been able to see something called view-throughs (which is basically the number of people who don’t click on an ad but later visit the client’s site and/or take an action on that site). When we are measuring resume submissions as the action they take, we often see another 30% of resume submissions are from people who didn’t ever click on the ad.
DoubleClick has data that support this as well. Sixty-one percent indicated that they go to a web site after seeing an ad, but not clicking on it and only 30% indicated that they were likely to click on an ad.
So what is the moral of this story? Well, that little banner ad that you think it just pulling an average click-through rate, might be providing a lot more value than you think. The best way to know is to ensure that you are using the right measurements and using an ad serving system that allows you to track post-click and view-through activity on your site.
May 15, 2007 at 9:45 am |
I’d be curious to research this and find out more about how view-through activity is tracked.
Before you know if you’ll be blogging about “think-through” activity…
May 15, 2007 at 12:11 pm |
AMEN! Loved it!
May 15, 2007 at 1:27 pm |
Hi Russ,
View-throughs are generally tracked via cookies placed by the ad serving system. This way we track who has been served an ad and who then later visits certain pages of the clients site. Post-click activity tags are placed on all important pages of the client site. View-through is a standard measurement that almost all ad serving systems can provide, but often in recruitment – advertisers do not take advantage of it.
Thanks,
Laura
May 23, 2007 at 6:32 am |
[...] Banner Ads Improve Their Street Cred [...]
May 29, 2007 at 10:45 am |
Hi Laura,
Thanks for continually to putting out great content like this.
Matt
June 15, 2007 at 2:25 pm |
[...] Banner Ads Improve Their Street Cred For most of my career, I’ve been challenged and/or heckled by someone asking/stating “Come on, those banners don’t work?!” or “Well, I never click on banners”. And I have steadfastedly stood by my graphic ad friends, because they do add value. I’m not alone anymore! According to research published in the Journal of Consumer Research […] [...]
September 15, 2007 at 9:10 pm |
i am really sure that little banner ad average click-through rate, might be providing a lot more value than what we guess. they are making big big profits from this. if there are less challenge or hecked it will be really useful for all of us i guess..^^