Tips & tricks to ensure a total fail and to draw my personal ire & ultimate disgust.

Everyone hates banner advertising, right?

Perhaps; but I’m under the growing suspicion that the true disapproval of banner advertising has more to do with the thoughtless development focus and less to do with the success of the advertising medium itself.

There are so many poorly designed banners floating around the Internet and so little time to dismantle them, but I will do my best to outline some very case-in-point examples of creative methodology blunders, faux pas, and things that make my loins stir with delight.

What is the goal of interactive media as a figment of a total marketing mix? Banner placements (in the traditional sense) are most effective as a means of driving search, brand recall, and enhancing reputation. Even after taking advantage of the latest and greatest ad technologies (contextual, behavioral, etc.), click-to-conversions should be considered gravy on top of your mashed potatoes. Other site based metrics, namely branded search and return visitation, should be monitored as the core KPIs.

Here is a sample quantification of a successful banner campaign (mind you, omniture and other reporting tools other than Google Analytics make this much easier through engagement mapping):

Figure 1Note the all too coincidental occurrence of impression spikes leading to Paid Search conversion.

There are plenty of external forces that can attribute to banner success and failure, depending upon the marketing channels that are being exploited. The above example is taken from a client that was hot & heavy running a contextual/behavioral hybrid campaign along with a well optimized adwords campaign. The results, both site-wide (branded growth and return visitation) and multi-dimensional (above), all lent themselves to great success, but the click-to-conversion was the most porous of all, to the tune of .05%.

Do you really actually really, really, really care about clicks or not?

‘Clicks…clicks! I want some freakin’ clicks!’

Playing the click-through rate game won’t work for everyone. Are you interested in a low click cost on banners or a more utopian ROI? Any good media planner will tell you that a case can be made for the latter in any pliable banner strategy. Expecting a viewer, only known by a few blatant behavioral cues or their news content preference, to gain enough education from your banner messaging and immediate site content to convert on the first visit is fools’ gold for most campaigns. Good luck even giving away free Rolexes with 100% first visit transactions. Unless technology allows us to serve banners to a group with a pre-disposition for searching your brand by name, we are stuck using traditional display advertising to serve a more lengthy purpose.

Position your banners to be a constant testable feature as a branding element, optimize them for recall, not clicks, and you will be set free from the ghosts of CTR’s past.

Click grabbers take any number of shapes and abominable formats. A few of the more traditional are:

And my favorite…

Oh, don’t forget this classic…

Don’t let me forget to mention that banners developed strictly for insane CTRs are not always complete failures. Actually, sites driving mass volumes of visitors interested only in achieving an insanely low cost per visit probably do okay (arbitrage, investment seekers, etc).

Let’s take a look at a few examples of live campaigns. Mind you, without seeing performance data, campaign targeting & rationale, or interviewing all involved parties; I’m merely looking at a live cow and telling you the milk is expired or totally delicious.

An important consideration when developing banners is the habits of the end user. If we’re serving ads to someone that may pass judgment in as little as 1/20th of a second, then at worst case we’d like that short period of time to be spent swallowing a thought that can later be recalled and researched. Below is a mostly static banner running live for girleffect.org.

In Googling the message “change starts with a girl,” their domain associated with the campaign lands #1. In the banner itself, the domain is hardly legible due to the miniscule font size; and in searching “girl effect” they also appear at #1. Why is this a big deal? Point blank, people will be influenced to search by your banners.

Figure 2 63% of respondents performed a related search from promotional ads

Figure 3 88% of respondents interacted in some way to web-based ads.

The question is, though you are ranking for your banner messaging, don’t they have the opportunity to pick up a more exact match and drive the all important ‘direct visitors’ (domain typed into browser)? Direct traffic is critical because it takes any possible search-based distraction out of visitor acquisition. Unless Girleffect.org knows more about me than I do, I’d assume that the targeting is inappropriate in serving me (a 30 year old male) this ad. Impression spillage is the utmost critical, especially if your banner isn’t otherwise the best thing since sliced HTML. Kudos for owning the SERPs for the ad keyword set, but this impression was ‘spilled’ on me with a slight misaligned messaging priority.

Let’s quickly outline a few important considerations in developing banners:

1. Targeting
2. Relevancy
3. Conciseness
4. Recall optimized
5. Simplicity

The banner as it appears below breaks nearly every rule.

1. Targeting: This display ad may or may not have been behaviorally targeted as I was logged in when I received the impression and I do remember searching within the network categorically in the past month or so. The jury is out.

2. Relevancy: The banner has very little (if any) design cues taken from the destination (below). The segue from the call to action on the banner to the site content is slightly loose. Though the facts are in clear above the fold sight, it seems like a more relevant lander would be the Myths vs. Facts page or a hybrid that takes a user’s thought process from the call to action “click here to get the facts…” to the site’s actionable content (they have a quiz and a download).

3. Conciseness: Wow, let’s have a stab at paraphrasing here, folks. I understand that the Feds may play a role in what can and can’t be said in marketing collateral for this particular sector, but there is most likely no reason to have an eight-phrase call to action. Remember our previous 1/20th of a second judgement period? This lengthiness in messaging, lack of banner mobility (the messaging fades in and is the only such movement), and diuretic call to action make this a highly inconcise banner ad.

4. Recall Optimized: Marketing Sherpa has reported that the ideal frame format to drive brand recall is to alternate strictly branded slides between messaging elements. I tend to agree with the Sherpa quite frequently, as do tests and experiments. In this instance, we have no bold and visible logo; no theme connection or relevancy between banner and landing page; nor is the image of a scale consistent with the site. Our sole recall optimization point is that in the unlikely circumstance that a user is driven to search ‘high fructose corn syrup’ after viewing this banner, they will be grabbed by a paid sweetsurprise.com ad sitting in the #1 spot.

5. Simplicity: Simplicity really refers to the ability to convey your message in a limited character count or effectively with images. This banner misses the mark. It’s important to remember that unless you are a monster brand with a great reputation, you have not earned enough credibility to make your content desirable to the general population. Once you’ve paraphrased your original messaging, take another read-through and clip some more. Sometimes you can even risk being grammatically questionable and still be well within best practices for effective banner creation. It’s very important to remember that it is typically not the most creative banner messaging that performs best; more often than not it may simply be the most obvious.

This is a terrific example. The below banner is as concise, simplistic, recall-optimized ad (try searching for ‘mini sirloin burger’ and note the well-sized logo). The call to action is so simple and creative that it is frightening.

And frankly the worst thing you can do is allow chop-shop affiliates to butcher your brand with poor grammar or misrepresentations (see below). Keep your brand standards and guidelines underneath your pillow at night; it should have drool stains. If engaging in affiliate marketing make sure that you are being represented with dignity, for crying out loud.

Banner advertising is far from being a lost form of online media. The perception of banners being an ineffective means of delivering a message comes from an explicable misaligned set of goals, tracking, and judgment in developing goals and performance indicators. The only death in the banner family is the click-through-rate as a means of gauging total campaign performance. With a proper creative audit for consistency, simplicity, and integrated relevancy, you too can have a Jim dandy of a banner strategy to compliment your marketing mix.

There are new tools and platforms springing up everyday featuring “REVOLUTIONARY” ways to optimize ad placements both for the publisher and advertiser, specifically giving the ability to track engagement time with an ad.

Great, we can now waste time optimizing nothing from nothing. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t sound like tools analyzing ad engagement time can be truly revolutionary; maybe a helpful reporting plugin at best. Rather than continuing to sort out the few remaining suckers and shove non-engaging ads down the throats of social networkers as if we are the patron saints of all that is right in the world, we need to re-think the marketing roles that we’ve carried since the birth of Christ and start involving savvy users in the game.

Imagine a world where the end user has their own ad controls.

What do you think?

Sitting on an OMMA panel, Daniel Redman was joined by approximately 300 peers all discussing scaling ideas and the many successes of Behavioral Retargeting. The topic of the conversation was ‘Retargeting to Scale’, exploring both the profit and pitfalls of Retargeting. As this marketing strategy begins to make a prominent presence in Internet Marketing, there are many things that could be taken from the panel.

Among Daniel, others at the discussion contributed their own inputs on the many advantages and qualities that retargeting has played in the online space. While the technology remains relatively consistent, many have found the benefits of retargeting to be extremely successful by employing a host of strategies and product couplings. As questions at the panel were being answered, those present and listening online were able to take away more than just responses from the panelists.

As Daniel stated in a response, “It truly is a double-edged sword, as you certainly want to isolate and segment your site traffic, however you don’t want to make your prospect pool too thin.”

The panel was moderated by Alan Chapell, Chapell & Associates. Below are Redman’s formulated responses/notes to the questions posed by the moderator and some additional ones that time could not permit.

As I think back to my days at DCLK with the Boomerang product, retargeting always sounded good in theory, but as a practical matter, it was so hard to find that shopping cart abandoner downstream. What are some unique and innovative ways that you’ve addressed the scale issue?

With the ability to segment your creative by site action, you can easily isolate behaviors such as abandonment. You can literally distinguish between any number of activities that are site usability deficiencies. Though, it truly is a double-edged sword, as you certainly want to isolate and segment your site traffic, however you don’t want to make your prospect pool too thin. The important thing is to continue adding segments rather than making them a singular campaign strategy. For example, rather than excluding visitors, who DO transact, develop an offer or cross-sell program for that group. This isn’t allowing for scale up, per say, but it’s at least keeping you from trimming to deeply. A method that eVisibility will be employing in 2009 to replenish Retargeting visitors with quality traffic is an integration with Social Media channels stimulated by organic traffic. In testing, this has rendered exciting results.

Provide an example of a how retargeting helped achieve one or more of your client’s goals. (e.g., driving sales, shortening the sales cycle) What is the metric for success?

An ecommerce client selling big ticket furniture had a sales cycle that turned 11% of all of his transactions after 9 days from first visit. As it’s a vertical with quite a few competitors, I expected that I would improve conversion rate after 9 days and see an increase in the long cycle transactions at the same time. That wasn’t the case; total sales cycle decreased, volume increased, and now even though we’re winning $1,600 average transaction values, we’re only picking up the post 9 day sales at a 2% clip.

As we are our own best client, eVisibility is achieving a 50% decrease on lead cost versus paid search. Coupled with what we call the ‘They’re huge’ effect, retargeting has been a stronghold in our approach. We’re earning more call-in leads and simple reconnections from lost prospects that attribute in part to retargeting.

The pattern here is that Retargeting seems to perform most startlingly well in a competitive space.

When thinking about conversions, what % of conversions are click thru vs View Thru conversions? And what are some of the challenges you see when addressing attribution – particularly with view-thrus?

Of course with view-thru, clients are concerned that they are paying multiple times for the same sale. There is some validity in this of course, depending upon what other marketing is concurrently taking place.

The message is simple on CPA campaigns; take into account click costs in determining a whole acquisition cost. It’s very nominal.

What impact are retargeting campaigns having in terms of increasing Search queries?

Ive certainly seen and felt an impact on branded queries, though it’s not a 100% infallible data comparison, because we have very little insight to the origination of a query string in most cases. It’s a near improbability to truly track the influence of marketing actions on a searcher. WE can gather a lifetime story and gauge tendencies with current technology, but until our brains have ‘Intel Inside,’ pinpointing actual influence is a pipe-dream.

How many segments (hp, search, product pages, and conversions) on average are you observing for any given brand and how does the message change for each user on these segments?

Retargeting is highly reliant on the quality and quantity of traffic and which goal or goals are established from the onset. Campaigns have been a success driving merely a few conversions a week. Others successful campaigns are driving over a hundred per day. 9/10 times clients aren’t seasoned enough to be able to take the next step with retargeting and allow for deep segmentation. Most are simply getting their feet wet with a basic retargeting model. Typically, clients run retargeting, experience great success, and aren’t interested in investing to get more from what is ‘already outperforming’.

What are some mistakes someone can make when running a re-targeting campaign?

I know we are having a conversation about scaling retargeting, but simply speaking, retargeting can fail when it is not coupled with a significant traffic source and all consistency/relevancy factors are ignored. For all intensive purposes, this is not a stand-alone marketing initiative. Retargeting provides a wealth of ways to customize in order to gain accellerated success. Landing pages, messaging consistency, frequency modification, etc. I imagine by dumb luck, sometimes you can have a well performing campaign by dropping a return visitor on the homepage with the same banners you were running in 1995, but it’s not likely.

During this down economy are pricing models changing? What % are CPM and what are acquisition/rev share?

As an agency, we are exploring more CPA driven deals. The more savvy prospect/client understands the mathematics of a CPA and will directly request CPM, but the majority of business owners these days really want to feel like they are getting what they pay for and CPA makes a ton of sense for them. If a client can sleep at night knowing that they are only paying for conversions, than more power to them and I will support that strategy 100%. CPA is really another way to attempt to play your cards against the house (a retargeting vendor). You’re challenging the technology vendor to ‘go ahead and beat me’, knowing that in your pocket is your site conversion rate (whether good or bad).

How do you see retargeting evolving over the next few years?

In the immediate future, I’d like to see greater integration across channels. The ability to control messaging in Paid search seems like the logical fit for me. More dynamic insertion capability, especially in use with sequential serving you could virtually create a new world for the end-user. Tag-teaming with the long but dead co-registration could be another avenue. Cookie lifespan is going to continue to be a hotly debated topic. How we, as marketers, can extend the life of a prospect and limit attrition will be critical as prospects become savvier. Overall, in the short term, retargeting shouldn’t try to second guess itself. It works; it’s great, let’s simply make a more efficient wheel and the keep the fed off of our backs.

What role (if any) does data play a role in the targeting process? And here I’m talking about data IN ADDITION TO the info typically used for retargeting (e.g., abandoned the shopping cart.) Is there value in pulling other data points, or does that become more trouble than it is worth? Why?

I recently delivered a webinar on data analysis. The summation of that was that data will set you free. This gets back to the point of isolation and segmentation. To give a specific application; a large volume publisher has an interest in retargeting but not an interest in footing a sizeable bill. By data-mining, it’s possible to identify the most engaged traffic by usability cues, isolate from outside navigation as much as possible, and retarget only the group that you can really knock out of the park.

Similarly, what role does creative play in retargeting? How much testing (e.g., A/B, sequencing, multi-variet, Etc.) is really going on at this point? Why / Why not?

In my experience, messaging and destination are the two critical elements in a retargeting campaign. Aesthetics finish 3rd by a great distance. Relevancy should be your grabber, not the imagery. This has been the problem with Myspace advertising in the past. You can serve a ton of impressions and if you use wild rich-media with in-banner vids and games, you’ll grab clicks; but they are empty clicks. A/B and multivariate are both valuable and should be taken advantage of. But, I can’t say that I am a poster child for doing so. It’s difficult to squeeze banner costs out of a client when they are already succeeding with their current set and their prospect pool is recycling frequent enough to not saturate.

Put simply; in 2009, the Internet will find its way back to the people.

There’s been a constant struggle between capitalism and progressive sharing of information on the Internet since Licklider and/or Roberts (depending upon whether you believe in the chicken or the egg) picked up that first microchip and said “Let there be global data.” The role of marketers in our era is to expose segments of people, and match them to products and services through what we all commonly refer to as advertising. This creates a symbiotic relationship between marketers and consumers; though many consumers wish all marketers would go away and stop bothering them, marketing actually serves (though it may seem inane) an important role in the distribution and introduction of products to a virtual marketplace. It’s the old adage that people don’t wake up in the morning wanting a toaster with multiple settings; they are first shown the benefits of it and people just like them who are already enjoying the freedom of toasters with multiple settings.

So how does this directly apply to you and I

(and the collection of social mediaphiles) surfing the net, not for new toasters, but rather for members of the opposite sex and going on MySpace to make silly picture comments? One hyphenated word: Banner-blindness. In other words, it’s the phenomena apparent in generation X/Y and younger, which renders certain third party advertising relatively ineffective. This is a subconscious trend prevalent with the youth that have grown up net surfing, emailing, friending, etc. and have conditioned themselves to ‘pay no attention’ to online advertising, thus breaking the symbiosis between advertisers and consumers online. Myspace and Facebook are losing major advertising dollars due to failure of performance. Per Business Week, Facebook had initially hoped to generate between $300 million and $350 million in revenues for 2008—but lowered that forecast to $250 million to $300 million. MySpace ad revenue forecast was cut for 2008 by more than 22 percent—from $755 million to $585 million. Projections have dramatically reduced for 2009 to boot. Of course the economy has seen better times, but so has traditional offline advertising. Marketing dollars are flying to the net faster than the swallows to Capistrano. Search ad revenue (14.9%) and video revenue (45%) are poised for substantial growth on the net in 2009. One of the major question marks of the coming year is the performance of Social Media Display Advertising (recently approximated at 10% growth according to eMarketer, which was projected as high as 15% growth for ‘09 in August. To the waking world, social networks are pointing to the economy as a crutch to their feeble projections. In the trenches, there is a much different story.

“We have to really limit our buys on the social networks. Impressions are exorbitant, but our advertisers are reporting exceptionally poor CTR’s and conversion.” –Display Ad Network Representative (remaining anonymous to keep her job)

Businesses need marketers for the progress of product development and a reasonable brain washing in their respective customer base. Consumers need new products for the development of pop culture gains in human efficiency (and better tasting toast).

So how can both entities overcome this struggle of blindness vs. product consumption and co-exist?

I prophesize that advertising will be put in the hands of the consumer.

Campaigns, product recommendations, and blank endorsements will be the new M.O. and marketers will be at the core of it.

Marketers will provide the means, but ‘we the people’ will provide the ends; hence, the much needed symbiotic relationship to push business. Platforms will be built to allow everyday Internet users to spread good will to citizens of New York on 9/11 (sponsored by Ford), trash talk geo-targeted segments after a major sports victory or loss (brought to you by the NFL), and tell all of their friends the secret to shiny hair is L’Oreal Shampoo (brought to you by L’Oreal shampoo). Advertising will take the back seat to independent consumer-bred messaging.

This is not to say that marketers will be depleted of their reason for existence. On the contrary, they will still play the key role of matching products to segments; but it will be minimized. They will own and create the technology and platforms that publishers and advertisers can directly adopt, even with little to-no prior experience or investment. From there, it’s up to the consumer to make it viral (or desirable).

Viral campaigns are most successful when they are able to breathe and are not smothered with peanut butter and impression sandwiches. Skeptical? Search Google blogs for the first consumer product that comes to mind and count how many times on the first page you find a review, recommendation, or plea for advice relating to that product. Singular marketing is the most effective in gen X/Y.

What that means for the typical holier-than-thou Internet marketer that dreams of being Donald Draper, is that the room is about to get a whole lot nerdier. Previous difficulty in communicating with traditional agencies will become more of an adaptive environment for the offline folks than all of our crazy widgets, gadgets, and cookies that have riddled them for the past 3 or so years.

The outlook isn’t bleak in 2009, it’s liberating.

Behavioral retargeting emerged to be an extremely viable direct response marketing opportunity in 2008. The Arizona Republic published an article on January 2nd, featuring an elite retargeting technology provider, Fetchback. Much of the article includes information on how retargeting works and how it is successful compared to other types of advertising; says Chad Little, CEO of Fetchback, Inc., “I’ve been in the industry for a long time, and it’s arguably as good, if not better, than paid search, and paid search is at the top of the heap.”

Many people and businesses have yet to reap the benefits of retargeting. While it generally runs concurrently with other types of advertising, many companies do just that; they let other advertising methods play larger roles while a retargeting campaign is held at a much lower ceiling than its ROI potential.

Several companies have initiated the implementation of retargeting on a larger scale, and with much success. When asked to assess the benefits of retargeting, our very own Dan Redman offered his words of wisdom.

The affiliated site of The Arizona Republic daily newspaper, azcentral.com quotes, “With retargeting, you can basically assume that every person who reached your site . . . has at least a baseline interest in your product,” A clear understatement; this point is certainly true, but only a sliver of the retargeting total picture.

Perhaps misquoted, but Dan’s more complete thought was to express that, “If you are driving targeted (site) visitors, you can gather that they have some sort of baseline product/service interest. They are selecting the messaging in your ad to click after searching for keywords relevant to your brand; they are allowing a page load and may even spend a few pages reviewing your site. Particularly through SEM; visitors can be grabbed late in the education cycle. Additionally, on any great eCommerce or lead generation day, a website may turn anywhere between 3%-5% of unique visitors into a conversion. Retargeting assumes that though only 3%-5% will convert at the time of their tracked visit, previously interested and educated visitors may later convert.”

There is no doubt that retargeting is emerging as a new and effective way to advertise. What many people are starting to learn is that it is not just a strategy that simply runs in the shadows of other marketing techniques. Rather, it is a necessity for any would be successful online marketing initiative.

Learn more about our behavioral retargeting services.

Have you ever wondered (as I commonly do): where is eVisibility positioned in the world of social media advertising? That long awaited answer that many of us have lost precious sleep trying to figure out has now been resolved; and let me tell you the wait has been worth every minute of tossing and turning. The largest and most reputable network of bloggers the internet has ever known, has named eVisibility its advertiser of the month. This should come as no surprise, as we have been publishing more blogs by volume than any other subscribing agency.

This recognition has been some time coming, as our media campaigns have been hitting the Web in full force. Within the last month, we have launched social media campaigns with several reputable and household name brands. In addition to these successful social media campaigns, eVisibility is proud to announce a new offer of Social Media Consulting, where clients can learn the latest tricks in running and managing their own campaign.

If your prospects or clients are considering an advertiser to take them into the world of social media, which other internet marketing company could they possibly choose?