Thursday, November 06, 2008

Website visitors are not clicking on fancy glamorous ads

Since our office recently had a new server installed to handle multiple users logging into Peachtree, our computers seem to be acting like they are on a dial-up connection. Yawn! This slowdown gave me a chance to take a much needed break from my digging through new product technical data for our latest website update. It was time to actually read a magazine! Well, not just any magazine, but the eMarketingandCommerce.com eM+C November/December 2008 issue. On page 9 there is a brief article titled, “Consumers Not Clicking on Fancy Interactive Ads.”

Since I am a Squidoo Giant Squid lensmaster with some 384 lenses that feature fancy Glam Ads, I perked up when I saw this article. Squidoo lensmasters earn royalties from fancy Glam Ads ... so if a consumer study shows that consumers are NOT clicking on fancy interactive ads, maybe those aren't the right type of ads to be used? Just thinking out loud ya know!

iPerceptions, a leading provider of web-focused Voice of Customer analytics, released some interesting findings about consumer advertising preferences. The study conducted in August 2008, of over 14,000 visitors to leading media sites, measured their likelihood to click on different types of online ads.
The study found that … consumers are most likely to click on simple text ads (25% of respondents). Display ads follow in popularity, with 20% of respondents likely to click on right banners and 12% likely to click on top banners. A surprising finding of the study is that video ads are not very popular among most consumers; only 11% of consumers said they were likely to click on video ads. And 25 to 34 year-olds show no special affinity for video, being just as likely to click on video ads as text, right and top banners. The only consumers who seem to be engaged by video ads are young people under the age of 25, a group that accounts for nearly one-third of the video-ad viewing audience.

On average, 40% of consumers likely to click on any ad make less than $50K a year – and only 15% make over $150K. The income gap is most pronounced with video ads, with 49% of consumers likely to click on video ads making less than $50K a year – and only 13% making over $150K.
In summary, percentages of consumers likely to click on ads breakdown as:
  • 25% = simple text ads
  • 20% = right banner ads
  • 12% = top banner ads
  • 11% = video ads
Financially speaking:
  • 40% of consumers clicking on ads make less than $50K/yr.
  • 15% make over $150K/yr.

I'm looking for additional data on what types of purchases consumers are making online and what income brackets these spenders fall into.

P.S. It is May 29, 2019, I am retired and here I am reviewing this article from 2008! Oh man, I was so energetic back then.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting info. From a consumer's perspective (that's me) I do prefer simple text ads. I think it's mostly because they tend do be more targeted. The second reason is that you probably learn to ignore fancy banner ads, but text ads integrate into the content of the website better.

Unknown said...

Very interesting stuff...

Angela's Designs said...

I wonder how many text-ad clickers consume/purchase goods vs. admit they were just surfing around and clicked out of curiosity.

Making A Mark said...

So the bottom line is that those people who are least likely to have income to spare in the current recession are most likely to click on the ads.

Seems to me that there's a problem with that business model.

There's a fair few other commentators who have also identified problems with the Glam Ads business strategy and practices. For example, take a look at Glam Media Blames Economy, Slows Down Payments To Publishers

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