May 17, 2007 | Thursday

Bad news for banners

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |PPC |SEO

A new study reveals that the state of banner ads - including video ads, skyscrapers, and leaderboards - is perhaps worse than thought. In fact, click-through rates for such ads are at an all-time low.

In past years, marketers and industry analysts alike have acknowledged that average banner ad click-through rates in the U.S. have fallen far below their peak of 3%, and this data marks the same trend in Europe. It also reinforces the overall industry shift toward moving beyond the click-through rate as the most important ad performance metric.

Perhaps this will force the last hangers-on in the industry to accept, finally, that tricking people into paying attention to one’s brand is not especially effective. With search, potential customers who are actively seeking the products and services your company wants to sell them can find you as far down the buying cycle as you wish. It really is that simple - and it shouldn’t take years of empirical evidence like this to prove that there are much better ways of investing your marketing budget. Who’s going to risk their ad spend on next year’s further, inevitable plunge?