With the new release of Chrome (Google’s New Browser) yesterday and Microsoft’s recent “In” Ad-blocking option for IE8, it’s reasonable to say that the two most influential companies in Online Marketing have reenforced what most of us in the industry (and our ad agencies are realizing) already know… Advertising in its traditional sense and the Internet do not work.  

Now that is a bold statement and it does need some clarification, so allow me to do such.    Advertising, is the form that most “Push” marketing come in.  Billboards, TV spots, Magazine Ads and of course items like  Banner Ads online.    We know that Banner Ads get some where between a 0.2% and 0.7% average click-through rate as opposed to contextual, targeting text based ads like Ad Words on Google, which see some where between 1 – 3% CTR if  done.  Now, if you are looking for brand exposure, traditional advertising and its Banner Ad online counterpart are of course a reasonable pursuit, but if you are looking to drive traffic to your site, leads to your sales team or actual sales, to wastefully spend on “Advertisements” is just irresponsible.

We have to remember that most of us human beings have evolved to block out advertisements.  On the offline world we block out billboards along the highway as a simple survival tactic so we don’t get in accident. In the online world, we are trained to block out the top and right hand side of any page so we can efficiently sort thru the page in two seconds or less for what we want.   Moreover, we have a negative experience if we are somehow imposed upon to see an Ad (hence the demise of Pop-up Ads and invention of pop-up blockers).

Why do we still “Advertise Online”?  One, there are good sites that are highly relevant to our audience and so these sites, if placing your add based on Behavioral targeting or in areas that the ad is relevant to the user there on that given page, then the CTR goes way, way up and so, we get to a place that makes the efforts worth while.  Example, an IT professional searches for some advice on how best to secure his WAN and on the page that has an article about such a  VPN security company offers a white paper download to learn more about best practices. Where we get misled is many traditional agencies can easily come up with the creative, micro site and already have a “media buying” team to whip up a good strategy.  So, to pay for these teams, the creative staff they already have, “Media Buying” (i.e. Advertising) is pushed b/c they are already established to do just that and just need to re-appropriate focus to the online medium.

As always it’s easy to be a critic.  With that in mind, I would offer two solutions to solving this problem: 1) Ask for or get for yourself the reports from the Web Analytic tool you are using and compare your CTR and conversion rates from Ads to Google program.   Ask your agency or yourself to compare ROI (take some average numbers and run them) and then decide to take the bottom 10% (old Jack Welch, GE strategy) and cut it and put it back into those that are producing.   2) Do a search for your own product or service and see what comes up… go to the sites you would visit,  click on the ads or organic listing that seem relevant THEN reverse engineer how best to ensure you get found there… basically be a customer and your ad spend will become abundantly clear… don’t listen to me or anyone else. Trust your instincts.

Lastly, remember the experience on your website and respective landing pages is critical. Even if you have a great strategy for exposure, your landing pages can kill the ROI. So, take some of that ill spent budget and put into landing page and website efforts to really build the best most relevant customer experience possible. Even with a bad campaign, at least this effort will squeeze the most out of the money spent in converting the few visitors that actually make it there!

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