Here’s the most recent data: Percentage of Web users who click on banner ads on a monthly basis: .09. Percentage of those people who do so more than once a month: .02. So if 100,000 people see your 30-day banner ad campaign, 20 of them might have sustained a head wound serious enough to cause the degree of short-term memory loss necessary to accidentally click your banner twice.
Even more unfortunate is that nearly every one of those clickers is what is commonly referred to as a “Harriet Nyborg” - an older woman in the Midwest who loves sweepstakes, opening direct mail and talking to telemarketers about her deceased pets. So if your banner ad looks like one of those big novelty Publisher’s Clearinghouse checks, you’ve at least got Harriet’s attention. But pretty much everybody else suffers from what is known as "Banner Ad Blindness." Or "Bladness."
So why do these campaigns still walk the Earth? Especially when there’s so much more potential for that 728x90 space? Is it because the people who write the checks are still struggling to move on from the days of newspaper ads and magazine quarter pages? If only banner ads were targeted at those people, instead of real people, these campaigns might still have a pulse. Instead of a black-eyed hunger for eating perfectly viable pixels.
The web is a visually interactive medium, which means nobody likes to read stuff on the web (except you, apparently). But that’s all most banners offer. Reading. About an Ohio mom who discovered how to lose 10 lbs a week with one simple rule.
Or maybe it’s metrics. While .0018 isn’t much of a click-through rate, it’s at least something you can plug into an ROI formula. And that’s safe and comfortable.
But there are others who don’t believe the web should be a safe and comfortable place. The web is where stuff gets shaken up. Where things get messy. Where emotions run high and sometimes feelings get hurt. And where people are happy to vent about it 11 times a day in 140 characters or less.
And these are the people who are forming the shotgun-toting posse that will gladly put a bullet through the head of your undead campaign. And then say something pithy about it, like “That’s how to get a head in marketing. Booyah.”