The “online banner” has been dying for a while, with every research paper showing effectiveness declines no matter what way you looked at it. But we all love digital creative campaigns, so imagine if you could harness the targeting and relevancy power of adsense and adwords combined for your banner campaigns across the worlds largest media networks…
Ok, now your thinking… When they bought DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion a few years ago, they had something big in the pipeline and now they’ve launched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now anyone can buy any ad on any major website, and target users like never before. It’s sure to be massive for marketers, but also for Google and Media owners as they will essentially be able to charge more for the banners due to the new found quality of in-page targeting and purchase-cycle display timing.
For all the targeting and reporting reporting benefits, it still doesn’t address ad-blindness that is higher in banner-ads than almost anywhere else. Seriously, I cannot even remember when I last clicked on a banner ad. I doubt I click on more than 1 year at most! Even with the millions of net users out there, that’s a pretty small pie. Am I alone?
Trust me – people still click on banners, if it is relevant to what they are searching for. I’m running ads for the Designer, Pink, and College Snuggies now because they are the most sought after items. What Google is going to do with this is provide Publishers the ability to serve geo-targeted ads – This. Is. Huge. You can’t do anything with foreign traffic under a traditional affiliate network. Google is once again poised to change the game.
Display ads drive brands’ messages better than any other advertising method – that’s a well known fact. But here come the problem as Stuart Noton well described as “ad-blindness” issue.
As I see it, the issue is not that people are blind to display ads but rather the current methods lack of measuring display ads exposer’s effectiveness (quality) to users eye-balls.
In short, ad-words are for immediate/short term engagement while display-ads are for long term engagement and that’s why clicks are not the right measurement for this kind of advertising.
I hardly see any new benefits Google has to offer in this “new” service and I’m happy for that because it gives hope for new players to challenged the display-ads market.
Stuart, you are not alone
No, you’re not alone. I completely agree. I filter banner ads all the time because they’re always for useless crap I have no interest in. SOMETIMES the banners actually apply to what I want, but most of the time, I have no interest in a free Xbox 360 or punching out the [insert annoying cartoon here].
You or I may not click on banner ads, but a portion of the population does. The more relevant they are the higher the ratio of people who click on them. This is news because it gives greater access to targeted traffic.