Author: Andrew K Long
In the mid to late nineties, online advertising was something of a novelty item - a way of showing off technology on the Internet and also a source of intense debate.
There was a very mixed opinion amongst marketing and IT specialists, as to whether this format would develop into something that people would want to see and more importantly, would actually respond to.
In the last few years, we have seen a combination of major developments in technology and the growing requirements of a sellers market - we now see a very different picture emerging, as far as banner advertising is concerned. What was once a format for 'click happy' surfers has now become more of a branding tool for advertisers.
It now seems that people are not clicking on flashing banner ads for fun any more, nor are they following every conceivable link to find varying levels of information about general subjects.
It is true that people search for everything on the Internet these days, but it is now believed that people are certainly being far more selective with their time and how they respond to technology-driven designs and formats - banner advertising seems to have moved on, or backwards depending on how you look at it.
If we look back at the response levels to early banner ads, we'd see that the standard formats and sizes would bring in click through rates of around 1% to 5%. Nowadays, any banner advert bringing in 0.3% CTR is doing well in most markets, although this is still low in very targeted industry sectors.
If you compare this click through rate with pay per click advertising, it is easy to see why so many people are moving towards PPC as a an extremely cost-effective way of getting people to their website. It also seems that text ads are pulling better than image ads on a PPC level too, so people seem to be more open to clicking on text-rich content than they are with image-rich content.
For this reason we are now seeing that a lot of banner designers are toning down their Banner Advertising designs to static images, so they no longer flash and go out of their way to attract attention. It is, in fact the general opinion that advertisers are going to get a better response with a simply designed banner than they would with a FLASH or animated banner. There is also evidence to suggest that designs which match the colour scheme and the environment of the targeted website will increase the chance of its success.
So, banner advertising seems to have gone back to basics in more ways than one and this trend will probably not be so popular with companies offering solutions for sophisticated designs and creative expertise.
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