For years anyone working with ROI-oriented clients avoided banner ads. Now courtesy of Tacoda, Starcom and comScore, we know that "Natural Born Clickers" are aimless losers madly clicking on ads way out of portion to their importance as consumers.
Just 6% of the online population make 50% of all the clicks on display ads. Close to 70 percent of all the people online never click on anything. Banners rather than being eye candy are just a blooming, buzzing eyesore; the digital equivalent of roadside billboards. This is borne out by the absence of a correlation between clicks and attitude toward the brand. The noodniks who click don't care any more about the brands they click on than the average netzien who generally and consistently ignores the brand banners.
Its not surprising that heavy clickers don't look like anyone you want to market to either. They're 25-44 in households earning $40K or less. They spend four times more time lingering and randomly clicking online than normal folks. They haunt auction, gambling and career sites and I'd guess porn sites, too.
Greg Rodgers of Tacoda thinks these guys click more because they are exposed to 5 times more ads. Maybe. I think they click more because they don't have much else to do. It has the same relative impact as click fraud, where clicks are counted but they don't really matter.
Now the point of this study and the involvement of all these heavyweight organizations is that "click performance is the wrong metric for the effectiveness of brand building campaigns." Well ... duh!
The business development objective of the participating firms is to convince gullible advertisers that rather than count clicks they should have faith in banner ads to expose branding messages to the great unwashed online. This protects their franchise and shifts the metrics to avoid embarrassment. In joint press release they argue, "For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what's really important and generating clicks is an ancillary benefit. Ultimately judging a campaign's effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding ...."
Pay no attention to anything like online metrics. Rely on pre-and post awareness measures or standard brand awareness measurements, spend heartily with us and all will be well, they plea.
How about an alternative hypothesis ... brand building using banner ads is a chimera, a joke and a waste of time and money.
Danny,
We have cases/data that demonstrate that online display advertising enhances paid search results. So, though display results, when analyzed on their own in terms of CTR, suck; when display is in-market, search performs better. Analogous results in offline world as broad-reach "advertising" helps boost direct demand gen efforts.
- Les
Posted by: Leslie | February 17, 2008 at 07:21 PM
hey guys,
what the hell you all talking about ? do you really think that if a banner is not clicked, it definitely has to be ignored ??? what a bullshit - it's the same saying that tv, proint or outdoor ads are useless because nobody clicks on them. of course it's wrong thinking and I guess it's because there are so many direct response oriented adsense users, for whom dispaly advertising is just not proper. but they still try to use the same metrics for banner ads than for sponsored links. wake up guys, it just doesn't work the same - if banner ads are not good for you it doesn;t mean they're not good for anything. try tv advertising, see it's absolutely no value for you. does it mean it has no effect whatsoever ?
Posted by: piotr | March 24, 2008 at 05:52 AM