Banner advertising

What are the odds that you’ll click the next banner ad you see? Some stats suggest that you’re more likely to survive a plane crash or give birth to twins than to click a banner ad.

Even if scary, stats like that are based on some cold, hard facts.

Display advertising campaigns are renowned for their critically low click through rates, when compared to search advertising campaigns.

While average CTRs for display campaigns have reached a historically low 0.07% average, search ads still bring in at least a 2-3% average. And that’s just the average. If you’ve added the right keywords and created good ads, you can get even 20-30% CTR.

So, what could be a possible explanation for the 35x – 350x difference between search text ads and banner ads?

Turns out there isn’t only one, but a few very sound reasons why people don’t click banner ads.

First, banners are perceived as intruders – 61% of users said they click ads because they don’t want to be interrupted or distracted. Advertisers apparently also need to work on targeting – 58% of users claim that the banners they see aren’t relevant to them. No click there either. The third main concern is privacy and security: 57% of users are afraid of receiving spam from advertisers or of getting a virus.

However, 54% mentioned that they don’t trust the banner ads they see.

Yes folks, you’re missing on more than half of potential clicks, visitors or purchases because users don’t trust what they see.

Of course, there are a lot of other factors that could explain the low click-through rates: banner blindness, ad fatigue or even ad blockers.

Ok, so you’re probably thinking: “And why should I care about this? I’ll invest my money in search campaigns. That’ll do.”

Even if search is a preferred channel for a lot of marketers and advertisers, it has become very complex. If you haven’t hired someone to manage it for you, it takes a lot of time and patience to understand everything. Not to mention that search can get expensive without bringing in results.