| It's important to measure ROI when spending marking dollars. Tactics change (both in price and effectiveness) over time, so I regularly evaluate them to see if I can find the ones that will give my clients the greatest bang for their buck.
Today, I'm thinking about online banner advertisements. Why? Because, for all their faults, online banners are one tactic that allow the advertiser to gather hard data on their effectiveness. When I place a banner on a site, I can tell how many people respond - allowing me to make better advertisements. I can even measure the quality of the response once people click thru to my site - allowing me to develop a better mousetrap on the other end.
If you purchase online advertisements, I'd love to read your answers to these questions:
(1) Why are you buying banner ads? What is the purpose?
(2) Branding: Do you place any value on the fact that people may see your advertisement, but never click on it? How much value?
I'd be interested in this study: What percentage of people actually notice a banner advertisement, regardless of whether they click on it?
(3) Response: What Click-Thru-Rate is acceptable?
What am I trying to figure out?
If I buy 1,000,000 banner impressions at $1 CPM (easy math), I'm paying $1,000. If the CTR is 0.3%, then I'm getting a response from 3,000 people (assuming one person doesn't click on my ads more than once, though that'd be another interested study). In essence, I'm paying $0.34 for the opportunity to communicate with each person that clicks on my banner. How does this compare to other forms of marketing?
And related to this... Let's say my 1,000,000 banners are seen by 30,000 unique individuals. Do I place any value on the branding that happens when someone sees my advertisement, but doesn't respond? How does this compare to other forms of marketing? |
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ephealy's journal
SLU in particular is a well known community website and most users understand that the site is at least in part paid for by community content creators. The content served by these banners is usually applicable to SL community members, so establishing reasonable visual recognition is important to me, whether actual clickthroughs are high or not.
In general, I have found that publicizing in this manner has been very useful and have seen good ROI since the visual recognition has also led to good word-of-mouth referrals.
My clickthrough has been sitting at around .4%, ~$38USD for 10000 impressions/month on SCD. Less clear on SLU, but i always notice slight dips in traffic when I am having an off couple of weeks with SLU (i do two weeks off, two weeks on).
That said, my own experience with banner ads is very unique, particularly because of the community nature of the sites I advertise on.
As a general practice elsewhere, like on more commercial sites, I barely notice banner ads at all, as I have more or less conditioned myself to ignore them. Unless the ad is eyecatching, interesting, and directly relevant to the market that visits that site, I will not click on the banner, I will not commit the name to memory, i will even deliberately go out of my way to avoid patronizing those businesses if at all possible. That probably makes me a bit hypocritical, i'm sure.