Online, banner ads are the closest thing to offline advertising as they contain a high degree of creative and reach a large audience. Mainly for this reason they have dominated online advertising budgets over the past few years. However they are far more powerful than offline advertising as they can be interactive and be placed in real time allowing rapid A/B testing. Unfortunately due to their cost and consumer behavior online they can produce poor ROI if used inappropriately.
Sourced from marketingvox.com
Beating out Yahoo, Google will gain access to the nearly 100 million users of MySpace, providing web search and sponsored search links for the social networking site, reports CNET. News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media said the deal extends over three years and nine months and grants Google exclusive rights to provide search and ads not only to MySpace but also other FIM properties, including videogame and entertainment site IGN, collegiate and pro sports network Scout.com, movie lovers’ site Rottentomatoes.com, among others.
MANY YEARS AGO WE realised that one of our company’s key strategic goals was to find ways to convince prospects and clients that they should be moving some of their existing Web site marketing budget away from tactics like banner ads and TV and towards more effective contemporary marketing campaigns like search engine optimisation and search engine advertising.
Written by Jon Ostler – founder of First Rate
Would you use a weapon that fails to hits its target 99.75% of the time? If you are using banner ads to generate traffic then this is exactly what you are doing. The average click trough rate for banners tracked by DoubleClick is now <0.25% so you will get only 2.5 clicks for every 1,000 banners displayed (CPM).
This article is not an attack on the use of banner ads, but rather a review of the good, the bad, and the ugly methods being used by online advertisers in an attempt to generate traffic from banners (or blood from a stone).
Jon Ostler, technical director for First Rate, an Auckland based search engine marketing specialist knows all about generating business through the web. His team works with clients to maximise the performance on online marketing campaigns – campaigns that can often be up and running and returning measurable sales in a matter of hours.
Five years ago, internet marketing via the world wide web meant primarily finding ways to make the underlying HTML of a website best match the expectations of the leading search engine, which at that time was AltaVista.
How things have changed; selling via the web has crashed and risen again since then. As well as that, AltaVista has been eclipsed by newer technology, exemplified (for now) by Google.