Hello World.
It’s interesting how many people still buy banner ads that “target” their ideal customer.
Banner ads used to kill it. They incentivized most publications to create a web edition of their content. In fact, a lot of the publications that you read every day are most likely paid for with these banner ads. It’s no question that banner ads are a great source of revenue for content-focused sites. So what’s the deal?
They suck.
Not only are they ugly, but they’re ineffective. Let’s jump into some quantitative evidence:
- The click through rate for displayed advertising is 0.08% as of the date of this article. Source Google
- Ad-blocking grew 41% in the United States over this past year and 82% in the UK. Ad-blocking software is now utilized by 198 million people globally. Source Pagefair
Your target audience does not want to look at, or interact with, your shitty banner ad. They just want to read the content that they came for and leave.
If you don’t believe me, pause and ask this question to yourself:
“When was the last time I saw a banner ad that made me absolutely have to have something?”
The answer is probably something along the lines of:
“I can’t remember, because I hate banner ads.”
“I don’t know, I use Adblock Plus.”
“I don’t even pay attention to the part of a site that has ads on it.”
The fact that ad-blocking apps hit the top ten chart in Apple’s app store during their latest release of iOS should be a tell-tale sign that it’s time to head for the hills.
And by hills, I mean content marketing.
Instead of spamming the f**k out of your potential customers, you should repurpose all of those advertising dollars that you’re basically just throwing in the trash on banner ads, and hire some content writers.
People don’t want to pay attention to things that they don’t care about. If you write quality content about topics that your customer wants to read, they will find it. Not only that, but they will trust your brand as an authoritative figure on the topic, automatically increasing your brand’s worth with that person.
It’s almost 2016, it’s time everybody stopped thinking about digital marketing as a statistics based game, and started thinking about the actual humans that they want to sell their products to.
Your banner ad campaigns are just hurting your wallet, we all know you can do better than that.
