If you’re like me, you’ve long since given up on banner ads.
After all, who cares that your ad has been shown 25 million times – if nothing happens, you don’t get sales, or you don’t get a traffic bump. And banner adblindness is such a major, major reality these days that this is often exactly what happens.
However, there may be a side benefit – one that a smart people with access to a lot better metrics and data than you and I could find:
If you run banner ads, one study for Harris Direct shows that you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. That’s just fine, though I’m on the record as saying that most banner campaigns are a waste of money. The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.
Wow.
The source is Usama Fayyad of Yahoo! (He’s one of the few people can say, “Well, yes, actually I am a rocket scientist.”) He now runs their Strategic Data Solutions division.
Source: Seth Godin.
[tags] online, advertising, banner, ads, PPC, Yahoo, AdWords, seth godin, john koetsier [/tags]