Banner advertising (or “display advertising”) is something that every Internet user experiences on a daily basis.
Even though they are a common part of Internet life, there’s a lot of dicey information about whether they really work or if they are even worth it.
We had a look at some facts to shed some light on everything.
Banner Advertising Is Second In Online Spending
Second only to Paid Search, banner advertising beats out every other medium for online advertising spend. In addition to this, banner advertising continues to grow year after year. According to eMarketer digital advertising will exceed TV advertising spend in 2017 – a historical moment in online advertising.
Many People Own Adblocking Software
As of 2015, nearly 200 million people own adblocking software this represented a 41% growth from the year before.
In fact, 33% of Internet users consider banner ads to be “intolerable”.
Click Through Rates Are Low…Very Low
The average CTR for banner ads across all ad formats and placements is 0.17%. This means that for every 588 impressions, you will get one click.
Although this seems so low that it isn’t even worthwhile, this is commonplace for display advertising in 2016. It’s not uncommon for campaigns to make hundreds of thousands of impressions in order to get a substantial amount of clicks.
Part of the reason for this low rate is that people have a choice whether to engage with the ad or not. Unlike radio or TV, where people don’t really have a choice whether they interact or not, a display ad actually has to get someone’s attention.
So…Are They Worth It?
When we look at the facts, there seems to be something missing. On one hand, display advertising represents a huge chunk of online spend and is continuing to grow and on the other it seems like they aren’t effective and people hate seeing them.
The thing is, a lot of people don’t do display advertising the right way in 2016. The days of static, boring banner ads are long gone, but there are still a lot of them out there. The way to really leverage banner ads is by using social media and retargeting.
Social media display advertising looks much more natural in the environment as opposed to other websites. They can also be targeted to specific users based on demographics, which increases their efficacy.
Retargeting is also very effective. Users who view retargeted ads are 70% more likely to convert, and although the click through rates for retargeting ads isn’t very high, they are great branding tools.
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