Thoughts on Optimizing Online Display Ads
 

To understand online advertising, you must understand women’s haircuts. To wit, have you ever heard this line: “How do you like my new haircut?”

Gentlemen, you’ve probably been in this same boat before (and ladies on the other end of it). Your wife gets a new haircut. You don’t notice. Consequences ensue.

But as a man, I can attest that we only notice huge changes in things that vastly interest us. She had hair before. She has it now. What’s the difference?

However, if the wide receiver you’re starting on your fantasy team has even the slightest limp, you’ll instantly notice. Because you’re just that interested.

And I have news for you – your online advertising is not something that your audience is hugely interested in.  Visitors view Web pages as content in the middle with noise all around it. That noise is banner ads.

So, how do you stick out among that noise and grab attention? Do you always want to?

When you want banner blindness

Sometimes, perhaps counter-intuitively, you want banner blindness. Like a zebra, you’d prefer to get lost in the herd.  If you’re paying for clicks, you don’t necessarily want to draw attention to your ad.  In other words, you don’t want curiosity clicks because you have an interesting ad. You want people that were so motivated, they hunted through the pack, found your specific ad, and just need to know more.

Another example is when you have complementary information that you want people to be able to find if they’re really looking for it, but you don’t want to distract from the main message.

Banners?  Where we’re going, we don’t need banners.

Of course, the future of marketing is all about inbound marketing, right? Sometimes, as we often learn in our experimentation, you don’t want to optimize the marketing tactic, you want to try an entirely new approach.

Sometimes the most effective banner may be no banner at all.   Write a blog post, perform a direct marketing campaign, or distribute a targeted email campaign.  Take the time to test and find out what is effective for your intended audience and manage the response return.

Contributor Source:  MECLABS, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL