A few weeks ago I installed phpAdsNew to experiment with the idea of running my own banner ad publishing system.
I hope to have advertisers for my coffee blog within the month and wanted to be able to serve ads, track statistics, and generally wreak havoc.
I’m doing a good job with that so far.
Overall impression: phpAdsNew is very powerful yet comes with a learning curve. They need a “Wizard” or something fo helping newbies get going. I almost gave up when I couldn’t figure out how to insert banner ads. You can see my results on the sidebar. I threw a picture of a shot of espresso up on the left side on BrainFuel.
One thing: if I were an advertiser I would rather pay to get PageRank juice. That’s what I want and I’m convinced my future banner ad customers will see things the same way.
6 responses to “Does anybody even click banner ads?”
Interesting idea, but to answer your question. I am a heavy web user, but I don’t recall ever clicking on a banner ad on someone’s website. My approach is that if I am looking to purchase something, I’ll go look for it. But then, I’m not easily swayed by advertising anyway. I’m happy to go look for what I want to ensure that I get the right price/performance/quality mix that I need for that particular item anyway.
…can’t click banner ads if you use firefox and run/install the CSS ad filter plug-in…I haven’t seen a banner add in months :-)…
…but, I am sure I make a small percentage of your potential audience…I still see the google ads occasionally, and have clicked on one or 2 in my life.
Jeff – that’s one more reason why I think paying for a static banner is better. If banner ads aren’t served with a banner ad software system you’ll still see them. For example, you no doubt see the Tornado button on the sidebar but you probably don’t see the coffee below the caption contest one.
Chris,
I actually did my thesis on banner blindness and had a chance to use eye-tracking technologies to see if users actually even saw banner ads (we already knew the click-through average was around 3%, which is very good compared to the national average). Turns out that many web users percieve anything area of a website that even looks remotely like an ad to contain irrelevant information and learn to avoid these areas after as little as one visit to that site. Putting the ads directly in the content and not giving them a definitive border (blending them in with the page) helped the CTR of those banners.
I avoid banner ads like the plague.
Depends on the banner, those that annoy me (dancing guy selling mortgages) I make it a rule to never do business with (they come across like used car salesmen) while those that promise information relative to my search I give a once over and may or may not click on.