Online Advertising

Online Advertising: Still Impotent, But Size Matters

Online advertising continues to be an appalling ineffective way to get customers to your site, according to research published by Google's Doubleclick division last year.

The click thru rate for online ads in Australia is a pathetic 0.07 %.

Let me put that another way, that's a 99.93% failure rate.

Of every 1,000 people who see your ad, only seven will click on it.

These figures reveal yet again the ugly truth about online ads.

Of course Google took the “empowering interpretation” that instead of the glass being 99.93% empty, it was 0.03% full.

Well, you could die of thirst trying to drink from that glass.

Still Is, and Always Has Been, Impotent

Does Online Advertising Work?

The Best Report I've Seen in Awhile

Adage has just released a report that basically sums up the state of online marketing advertising.

Titled Building Brands Online, it actually provdes a very detailed look at all the arguments of branding vs direct response, the results of various research into the effectiveness of online advertising, the problems and opportunites faced not just by online marketers but by the marketing and advertisng industry as a whole.

It's not a light read, but it is an essential one. Sort of like an online marketing and advertsing primer for 2010.

Some of the interesting points are:

Traditional offline advertsing still accounts for the vast majority of marketing and advertising spending accounting for:

Online Advertising - the Last Thing You Should Do

And the Top Five Things To Do First

Ninety nine percent of online advertising doesn’t work. Two more reports highlight the appalling click thru rates generated by online ads. One from Adtech and another from ABI.

photo credit: Pascale PirateChickan

After a study of more than 10 billion banner inquiries across Europe, Adtech found the average click-through rate fluctuates between 0.11% and 0.19%.

That’s a 99% failure rate for attracting visitors to your site. Any sporting coach with a 99% failure rate would quickly find themselves looking for a different line of work.

So why do so many people keep wasting huge amounts of money on something that is a total failure: In a word: HOPE.

But as a good friend of mine always used to say, “Hope is a t*#d with a cherry on top.”

For those of you who are ready to abandon hope and try the world of effective marketing then enter here.

How To Get More Customers Online

Some interesting reports have recently been released detailing what techniques and strategies many direct marketers are using to acquire and keep customers.

Direct marketers are usually the sharpest cookies in the marketing arena because they are obsessed with producing financial results, and will usually do whatever it takes to turn a dollar. (No bad taste jokes please.)

Therefore, they are usually worth listening to as they can always back up their marketing strategies with hard results.

The Number One Tactic

According to Target Marketing’s Media Usage Report, the number one tactic for getting more customers and giving the strongest return on investment (ROI) was direct mail.

That’s the printed, personal letter in an envelope with stamp kind of mail.

To Market Online You Must Market Offline

Traditional offline marketing is one of the most effective ways of driving qualified customers to your online business.

However, it is often totally overlooked by many in the ecommece and online marketing arena. Scratch any online marketer and you'll find an almost obsessive focus on search engine optimization, search engine marketing and online advertising.

There will probably be some talk about email marketing, and, if they are really on the ball, a discussion about conversion rate improvement, but traditional offline marketing methods will probably barely rate a mention.

As a business owner, this means you're missing out on a huge opportunity to drive customers to your site and generate revenue.

Traditional marketing's effectiveness at generating online customers was recently highlighted in research by The e-Tailing Group.

It found that consumers are most motivated to go online after:

Online Advertising Doesn't Work - Yet More Evidence

I recently came across a DoubleClick report entitled: Video Ad Benchmarks: Average Campaign Performance Metrics, which enthused about how video ads were 5 times more effective than graphic ads.

“Big deal,” I thought. Traditional graphic ads, banner ads etc have a click thru rate barely above zero, so 5 times zero is still nothing.

My assessment was confirmed later in the report where it stated: “…the click-rate for plain GIF or JPG image ads based on DoubleClick data is approximately 0.1%”

So let’s be clear about this. For every 1,000 people who see the ad, only 1 will actually click on it. If you couple that with the appallingly low conversion rates of 2% for most sites, then you need 50,000 people to see the ad just to make one sale.