They will, however, ignore the recent hysteria and assess the real situation. The truth is that the effectiveness of banner ads has decreased if you are looking at click-through rates. This is a fact, it's interesting - but it's only an acorn, a false indicator used to scare you about online advertising today. Rich media applications, relevant content sponsorships and other more robust vehicles allow marketers to capture data, customize content and present interactive panoramas to engage and motivate their audience. Click rates among these vehicles are much stronger than banner ads, but also declining in the increasingly cluttered online advertising landscape.
Advertising clutter has a deleterious impact on almost every campaign.
But, if you factor current click rates into your ROI calculations and negotiate well, you can still emerge with a successful campaign built around targeted, tested placements - including intelligent banners. Conversions cannot, however, be captured with click statistics. With online advertising, you have the power to influence both click and conversion rates through intelligent targeting, diligent optimization, kick-ass creative executions and effective messaging. You will never know, however, how effective your campaign is unless you set goals, capture data and measure against those goals. To do that, you need post-click data that tracks clickers past the click into the destination website to see how they interact with your site.