|
|
Edd Dumbill edd@usefulinc.com
With clickthrough rates now reportedly as low as 0.5% and practical experience often yielding lower rates, it's time site owners and advertisers asked "Are banners working?".
Very few users are actually noticing banner adverts, and even fewer are clicking on them. Even when adverts are clicked on, the poor quality of the information the user is taken to often means that they immediately go elsewhere.
The fundamental flaw in banner advertising is that it is undirected. In the main, users on the web visit a site for a purpose. By contrast, banners are usually placed on sites with little or no specific purpose.
This means that users will frequently see banners of absolutely no interest to them. Before very long, the user deliberately ignores the typical "banner-space" of a site in order to concentrate on the content they went to that site for.
Banners also suffer in that there is little differentiation between good and poor advertising: the advert for the dubious used-car salesman is presented to me on the same level as one for BMW. Why aren't advertisers angry about this?
The reasons behind the low quality and success rate of banner adverts are complex, but here are a few suggestions.
Complacency: marketers just assumed that the first thing they think of will work forever. There are still very few web-trained marketers, so most come from traditional media, predominantly print. Models in print advertising are pretty well-known. The web, however, is an evolving medium, born from the desire to create a useful online information resource. Marketers have just sat back and not tried to innovate in ways appropriate to the medium.
Naïveté: banner advertising is easy to understand. The technical issues behind producing web sites aren't. Marketers may believe that because this is the way everyone does it, then it's OK. Implementing banner advertising is cheap. More creative solutions aren't. So which overworked techie or project manager is going to break the news that banner ads don't work?
Arrogance: the poor standard of creativity and sympathy for the medium belies a huge arrogance on the part of advertisers and their marketers. The dwindling clickthrough rates are a wake-up call to such people. Millions of dollars are spent on TV and print advertising, but peanuts on web advertising -- conclusion? If you want advertising that works, pay for it!
Advertising and marketing is a necessary part of life on the web. but it needn't be so inelegant and clumsy as it is now.
Be directed: as mentioned above, general purpose ads can be a big turn-off. So, as a basic rule, advertise where your intended audience is. Some people are trying to address this by targeting adverts based on demographic information, but this is wrong. Aside from the unreliability of serving content based on, say, originating country, this could be construed as an invasion of privacy. Research also seems to indicate that unless users have explicitly provided a piece of personal information, they distrust any site which makes use of it. Again, it's an example of techie solution that appears to make life easier for marketers, so it'll be accepted.
The way to successfully direct your advertising is to group advertising with relevant content. Once your execs have got over the shock that it's not the front page, you should find out that if your widget is wanted by the kind of people who always read the widget column, you'll have a better success rate there. The caveat to this is that it takes more effort on behalf of both the advertising buyer and the web site producer, which leads me neatly on to the next suggestion.
Try harder: don't settle for banners. Don't even settle for other shapes. Work on your advert so it fits with the site you're advertising on and complements the content on the page. It'll take you a bit more effort, but you'll be justly rewarded if your advert forms a useful part of the user experience.
Change your thinking: take this new thinking about web marketing back into your own web site. Make your web site useful and user-centered. Make it easy for users to buy your product. They don't want to see a 30-second movie -- they got to your site to find out about you and your product, so don't put anything in the way of that.
The web is more an information resource than an entertainment medium -- there's a huge breadth of choice for a user, so they're not going to notice anything that's not useful to them for long.
Clearly, the thinking about web advertising needs to change, and must change as economic realities set in. Along with that, there needs to be a new currency for measuring success -- while we still think in terms of page impressions, deep-placed content-relevant adverts won't seem so attractive. We need a measure which reflects quality. Maybe for a while it'll be painful as we realise that there really are very few people responding to our adverts, but hiding from it won't do anyone any good. The current bloated figures from page impressions mask the deficiencies of banner advertising, and perhaps this goes some way to explain why people are content with such poor peformance.
If you would like to respond to this article, then please email me at edd@usefulinc.com. I will post responses here with their author's permission.
"Customers have a power they never had before" -- some marketers are speaking sense. See these comments from issue 1 of Marketing Week's e-volve. (added 6 July 1999)
Jeff Allen posted some ideas for advertising on a small budget to the ONLINE-ADS mailing list. His post included some creative ideas that struck a balance between advertising and actually providing more utility to the user. Jeff understands about the importance of interested users. You can find his full post here. Thanks to Jeff for his permission to republish the mail. (added 6 July 1999)
"Many marketers are in denial ... they keep running banners even though they don't work. I say, let's believe the data and move on." -- Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, July 11 1999.