50 Carleton & Associates

Description

On October 27, 1994, Wired.com gave birth to banner advertising . Along with it came the ability to know - with precision - how many times an ad was viewed, plus the new concept of "click-through rates". So what have we learned since then? Since display ads give us the ability to measure how many people click on them, click-through rates quickly became the darling metric to look at. Unfortunately, click-through rates have been dropping rapidly ever since banner ads were introduced. In fact, "[s]ince the 1990s, click-through rates for banner ads have dropped 97.5%." Ouch. This has raised two possibilities. The first is that banner ads are a horribly ineffective form of advertising. The problem with this conclusion is that we can't compare the click-through rates for banner ads to, say, road-side billboards or newspapers ads because the latter aren't clickable. Most advertising has had to justify its existence without the benefit of clicks. The other possibility is that banner ads do work, even if people don't click them. So which is the appropriate conclusion? 2. Banner ads may create a "lift" in site traffic of 20% or more. The research on this is less solid, so take it with a grain of salt, but multiple studies have suggested that banner ads do actually work. Even if people aren't clicking the ads, running a banner ad campaign is said to, on average, result in an increase of about 20% or more in site traffic. This means that, like other forms of advertising, banner ads do manage to increase people's interests in brands and products. Presuming that this is true, and banner ads are in fact a valid and effective form of advertising, what makes for a good ad? 3. The most effective ads don't look like ads. Turns out people don't actively seek out advertising to look at. What's more, they quickly adapt and learn to ignore things that look like ads. (Shocking, I know.) This finding actually applies to any type of advertising. The less your ad LOOKS like an ad, the more people will look at it. Said otherwise: Creativity rocks. The more unique and unexpected the ad, the more attention it will receive.

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