Marketing Views

Rethinking the Banner Ad

• the most important set, are the 94% to 99.5% who are typically going to see the banner, but not click on it at that moment in time.
  
  What impression are they left with after seeing the banner? A well designed banner will convey the message that your company's name and logo are connected with a particular type of product or service. Most readers will not have a need to follow up that particular idea at the moment, but over a long period of time you can use banners for branding. The impression that you give the reader is that when they have a future need for your product or service, you are in that market. They can easily follow it up, because you have invested in advertising, which is a customer service. The advertising signposts you leave around the web mean they don't have to work hard to find you amongst more than 2 billion web pages.
  
  If your banner ad appears on a specialised portal, then readers can search for your company based on what they remember from the banner ad. The effect can be larger than the number which instantaneously clicked on the banner. If you have a short and memorable url, like www.hp.com, then show it in the banner ad, in blue underlined text like a link. Readers can remember short links long after after they see the original banner.

• the next most important set are the 0.5% to 6% or so of viewers who instantly clicked to follow up on more information, when they saw the banner. Maybe they're just curious, or maybe they're actively researching for suppliers of your kind of products. You've made contact, but remember they're in control and can disengage at any time. Even if they're really interested, they're not going to add a $100,000 solid state disk to their shopping cart and charge it to Visa. What happens next depends on the value of the product or service, and what it's reasonable for a buyer to do. With careful planning, the web page they see next reassures them they've come to the right place and provides information they expected to see. It invites other actions by links which give them options to see more information, make contact with your company, or inititiate a buying process.
  
  The banner can filter interest for different types of products, and / or different types of customer. Viewers will self select a banner which looks like it's addressed to them. This can also backfire, if your message is too vague, because readers can also self select themselves out.
  
  A message which says "come to our event in Santa Clara next Friday " will work better than one which simply says "we're holding an event" with the location and date unspecified. What happens next will depend on what they see on the landing page they get routed to. If your web site doesn't make it easy for them to get more information, or it doesn't say anything at all which looks familiar, then you've just wasted a customer communication and you're in trouble. A good strategy is to repeat the banner ad on the target page, with some expanding text which says more than you could in the ad format. But if the banner contained your logo, and all your web pages include your logo, that's another familiar reference point.The reader doesn't think they've gone to the wrong place, and will invest a few more seconds to look at what's on that page.

• What's a Good Click Rate for a Banner Ad? - what you learn from testing banner ads - often results in you having to change the way you talk about your company in other places... your web site, your PR. Leaving this important task in the hands of graphics designers is lunacy. ...Later:- in 2010 - I updated this popular article to compare how banners compare to Google ads - in the same publication and with the same placement.

• Think of Web Ads as Signposts - they can lead the right people to your destination. But give them a credible message so that the brain follows the mouse click for sound business reasons. Ideally the ad should also signal to the wrong type of customer they can filter themselves out at this point and not waste their time and yours by following this path.