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after the fact
Study: Forget clicks. Real impact comes later.
By Marty Beard
Conventional wisdom holds that banner ads don’t have much of an impact, since web surfers click on them just 0.3 percent of the time.
But even if people don’t click on banners, that doesn’t mean they’re ignoring them, according to a recent case study of a banner campaign for U.K.-based business intelligence network Just-Sites.com.
The study suggests that banners do have a powerful branding effect, but that effect is a bit delayed. It’s all a question of looking beyond direct response metrics such as click-throughs.
One problem, the study asserts, is that marketers have not been measuring indirect response to banners. This results in the underreporting of campaigns’ effectiveness.
"It’s just a bit shortsighted to only measure direct response," says Oliver Wilkinson, Just-Sites.com’s online marketing manager.
Between March and April 2001, Just-Sites ran an online campaign on the Engage B2B network. The campaign’s goals were to ferry traffic to three Just-Sites' properties—just-food.com, just-drinks.com and just-auto.com--and measure the banners’ branding efficacy.
An analysis of the campaign determined that 47 percent of the response to the banners was indirect, and 53 percent was direct. "Indirect" refers to people who deliberately visited Just-Sites' properties after viewing a banner, and "direct" refers to click-throughs.
Sixty percent of indirect respondents arrived at the destination site within one day of having seen the banner. About 30 percent of the indirect responses came within half an hour. Forty percent of the indirect responses came within an hour, 90 percent came within a week, and 100 percent had come within 28 days.
According to the study, the shorter the gap between being exposed to a banner and visiting a site, the stronger the banner’s branding effect.
Just-Sites was able to establish the connection between viewing and visiting because it left cookies on the hard drives of people who were exposed to the banners.
The banner carried no call to action, just bright colors and a simple text message such as, "The leading automotive business site also has the latest automotive research," a logo and the URL.
Wilkinson says he believes that the simplicity and clarity of the banners is key to getting responses.
"Have you seen that banner with the ‘Punch the Monkey’ or ‘Shock the Monkey’ on it?" asks Wilkinson. "Have you noticed that they’ve just started putting their URL on the banner? Previously, I didn’t have a clue whose banners these are, and I’ve deliberately not clicked on them. I suspect someone pointed out they’re missing an opportunity."
The study also suggests that indirect respondents are higher-quality consumers than clickers. Just-Sites found that people who reached their web sites through means other than clicking through were more likely to stay longer and read more and were more likely to return.
"If you’ve clicked on a banner, it doesn’t take a lot of effort," Wilkinson says. "You can quick-click and arrive on the site and spend 30 seconds on site and head back. If you’ve seen a URL and had to remember it or opened a new browser window and typed it in or you’ve gone to a search engine and searched—if you’ve taken the trouble to do that, you’ll create a better-qualified visitor."
All this is not to say that the click-through as a metric should be abandoned entirely.
"There’s just got to be a bit of a balance," Wilkinson says. "That’s the trouble, and the reason click-throughs dropped is because people suddenly worked out that the words ‘click here’ aren’t a command."
Just-Sites’s future research will examine the optimal number of times that a banner should be shown to reinforce a branding statement; too many times can turn users off.
July 23, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.
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