What is the average click through rate for online banner ads?

Well it depends...

Those last three words are perhaps one of the most unhelpful answers you can get.

The reason for this post is that I've just been asked this question by a colleague in sales.

Now usually I’d fob off my sales colleague and say that they shouldn't be selling on click through rate (CTR), they should sell on who will see the advert, the demographic of our web users, the power of our brand - after all an ad that doesn't get clicked on doesn't mean that it hasn't been seen - BUT this time I thought, 'Why not? There must be some figures out there'. So here goes:

	2% - Off the top of my head I’d say that a 2% CTR would be particularly successful. I’ve seen ‘averages’ suggested at conferences, seminars and by friends of anything from 0.1% to 1% but not usually any more.
	0.1 - 0.37% - According to this post that quotes a study by MarkingSherpa with CTRs by banner size - I'm not sure of the B2B relevance of this though.
	2.8% - This post quotes the same MarketingSherpa study however states a "conversion rate" of 2.8%. So what this means is with a CTR of 1%, you'd need 3571 people clicking till you made a sale (or whatever your conversion is).

So with this in mind, let's go back to, "Well it depends..."

What else matters for banner ads?

• Branding – banner ads are like TV ads – there as much about branding as they are about click through so that’s an unseen metric that should be sold to any customers.
• Association - By advertising with you they are receiving association with your website's brand and the prominence that provides. i.e. Seeing a brand advert on the ft.com will probably be enough to convince you the advertiser is not a dodgy spammer. The same advert on a blog such as this one, may not have the same effect.
• Demographics - The demographic of your site users are also important to this branding exercise. If you have statistics on your visitors you should sell this to the advertiser. This is how facebook advertising works.
• Page views should be as important a metric to quote as click-throughs. Page views are the only way to measure ad views. i.e. An advert has had 300 clicks, but if it's appeared on a page with 30,000 page views it's likely been seen and not clicked many times.

Home page of the Times Online

• Targeting– showing an ad for a video game company on the video game section of a technology website will get a higher click through than putting it in an irrelevant section.
• Call to action – asking the user to do something increases click through – most banner ads seem to just consist of a logo and click here with no reason why you should bother. i.e. Win a prize, get a discount, find something that no other website has and that you need etc.
• Ads designed for site – This is really just targeting again. The more personalized you can make your advert the better. It's even worth getting a screenshot of the website the advert is going on so you can mock up what it will look like when it's live.
• Testing – running multiple ad variations in different slots and optimizing based on their performance is a sure fire way to increase click through. The more you test, the better results you can get.

  A text ad from Google Adwords

  
  
• Positioning and size – an ad in the middle of the page gets higher click through than one at the bottom. At the top of the page, bigger ads perform better usually. Again, you can test this.
• Text vs. image – there’s a load of discussion online about which is better – text can be better when subtly put in with your main content. Again test!

Related posts
Stop pop-ups popping up, online advertising needs to evolve (Nov 2007)

Should Google News pay publishers for their content?

Working for a publisher the discussion has come up on a number of occasions that surely Google should be paying us for the content we provide it via Google News.

Rupert Murdoch had a whinge about it last month:

"Should we be allowing Google to steal our copyrights? If you have a brand like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, you don't have to."

While, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Thomson came out with the slightly ridiculous:

"There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet."

Both quotes from the BBC article about this subject.

Should Google pay publishers for content? - No

It's right to expect to be paid in some way for content that you have spent time and money to produce.

Maybe when advertising revenues were strong it was something you could afford to ignore but now this source is receding digital needs to step up and produce another channel of profit. However, stating that Google should be the one to provide this revenue is a rather naive argument.

Google has found a way with Google News of taking what is available for FREE on the internet and making money off the back of it - through referrals to the rest of their offerings.

Off the back of this the main newspapers received a boost in traffic from Google News. When ad budgets were high, all was good. Increased traffic meant increased revenue from cost per impression, cost per click & cost per acquisition advertising business models.

But with no advertising money available thoughts turn back to the evil G. Surely it makes sense that if Google are making money from this content when no one else is then they should share this pot around.

Well no it doesn't, it's a crap argument. The publishers are offering their content for free online, to everyone. You can access the same content via traditional search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live Search) but nobody is asking for cash from referral here.

Until the content is not available for free on the internet, Google are never going to volunteer cash. They'll wait until somebody calls their bluff. If all the main newspapers pulled their feeds from Google News then they might enter into a discussion. This hasn't happened, yet.

Despite this Google still felt it was necessary to bitch back at the publishers claiming,

"[Google] has shared £3.3bn with publishers through ads program AdSense in the last year".

Well good point, but firstly Adsense is opt-in so doesn't apply to all publishers on Google News and secondly by making this statement Google is admitting that they do indeed owe the publishers something, schoolboy error.

How else can publishers make money online? - Subscriptions

Up until very recently most of the big players online were reluctant to broach the other obvious money from content method - paid for content / subscriptions.

The big UK exception to this is the FT, who in 2007 introduced a hybrid system where you could have 30 views per month before having to pay.

Subscription models become more viable with less money from advertising as site traffic and unique users become less important to the bottom line. Quality, uniqueness and diversity of content take over and differentiation from the competition becomes a sales tool for attracting the lucrative subscription market.

With the addition of subscription revenues, less revenue is needed from advertising to meet commercial targets. The lower traffic figures as a result of content gating and its knock on effect on advertising is therefore diluted.

And not to forget, Google News will still index your site (albeit with the 'subscription' tag).

The future? - Unique online offerings

Gated content is the online equivalent of buying a newspaper. Getting Google to pay you is the online equivalent of getting the newsagent to pay for your newspaper before selling it on.

"Online equivalents" are lazy ways of trying to transform business models to the digital age. In true 1990s buzzword speak it's not thinking outside of the box.

The brands that will prosper online are the ones that start to use the internet for its strengths:

• Huge audience
• Extremely fragmented demographics
• Extremely niche markets available
• Extremely flexible routes to market
• Personalisation and tailored news opportunities
• Portability
• This list is in no way complete; tell me more in the comments!

Instead of indiscriminately slapping a subscription wall around content, publishers should take a leaf out of Google News' book.

Use your generic consumer focused general news content as a free traffic driver - that's your website's bait. Let anyone view it, pimp it to every news aggregator going and if advertising returns you still have pages with high traffic. It will also keep your website brand out there.

Use this driver to push your paid-for content. Charge for all truly unique content, ie.

• Areas of news that only you produce and people need - ie. industry focused business news, such as the FT provides
• Premium reports - a tech magazine could publish SEO guides, link building guides, technical help
• Customised reports - Repurpose your unique content into bespoke industry reports for companies and charge for it. Ie. Look at where a company has been in your news and help them to create a report of their brand values in their industry.
  
• Sponsored content - Do you have a specialist news channel? Offer a sponsorship package where a company could provide content, sponsor competitions and get involved with your readership in a way not possible with banner ads.
• Apps - With the rise of iPhones & Blackberrys, apps are big business. Create something so unique you can charge.
• Sell bespoke content creation - Companies like their customers to think they know their markets. As a publisher you are in a unique position to provide your content in formats that companies can align themselves with - i.e. targeted minisites for brand building.

If people really need something and can't go elsewhere they will pay.

Be creative with pricing strategies. Online items can be sold on an ad hoc basis (download this PDF report for £10) or via a number of tiered subscriptions providing varying levels of access to your content (£900 a year for full unlimited access).

Want to know how to make lots more money online (not a spam link!)? Then read this fantastic presentation by faberNovel about Google's business model.

Related posts
Don't let Google boss your website around
Getting more hits from Google News
Google and Max Zorin, Bond baddies set on world domination

Only print specific sections of a web page and save the world

P*ss off advertisers the world over by only printing out the bits of a web page you want.

The oxymoron that is environmentally friendly printing

To be fair I’ve been doing this for years and single handedly saving the rainforests and defending pandas by copying any text from a site I want to read in a non digital format into Notepad and printing from there.

However you often want more than just the text (like pictures) and you've only a big red LED light where your laser printer should have a green LED light for presence of magenta ink and you know that printing all the adverts on a web page will push it over the edge.

So for you I present "PrintWhatYouLike.com, save the money, save the environment, print what you like". Really if I felt they were truly serious about saving the money and saving the environment they wouldn't be encouraging printing at all but I guess they're half way there and "save a bit of money, and a part of the environment" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Thanks to my colleague for forwarding me the link, it's really straightforward; the site lets you input the URL you wish to print then remove page elements before printing, such as MPUs, side bars, removing background. It also works the other way round - you can just select the bit of the page you want and isolate it. Internet Explorer did crash when I tried big manoeuvres when printing my own blog such as removing the background or isolating one blog post. Firefox on the other hand coped perfectly and quickly.

I rarely print stuff and when I do I just do my copy and paste to Notepad trick - plus a lot of sites have print style sheets these days which cut out clutter anyway but nevertheless it's a clever gadget with a good heart. Just remember to only use it in Firefox.

Online popularity culture is killing good journalism

Sites with 'most popular' box BBC Times Online CNN Reuters New York Times The Sun

Sites without 'most popular' box Guardian CNET Telegraph Don't quote me on the above information but it was correct when i looked

Pretty much every news site has a 'most read articles' and a 'most emailed articles' box somewhere on every page - indeed i wrote a post about a plugin that did just that a few months ago.

Journalists writing online are increasingly paid or incentivised based on how many hits they get. I was at a conference held by one of the UK's top online publishers just two weeks ago where i was told that all the journalists are incentivised on clicks to their articles as well as general site traffic.

Now this isn't surprising. Most online publishers make money from advertising. The more hits you get the more of an attractive proposition you are for advertisers. And if you are charging on a cost per impression basis then hits are your mainstay - or Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in buzzword business-speak.

The problem with this, as stated in a Lee Siegel interview i was reading in New Scientist this morning (subscription only), is that:

"Popular culture is becoming popularity culture, where quality no longer matters. News, for example, is becoming a popularity contest as never before."

By trying to ensure all your contributors are aiming for popularity through high hits and high email referral there is a real danger that news may start concentrating on quick wins. The subjects that get the most people's attention, that can be read quickly, and that provoke an instant reaction start to take over from often longer articles, that are well researched and present a deeper opinion but may take longer to digest.

The problem with this from a purely SEO point of view is that it is no coincidence that these high hit 'popular' articles are known as quick wins. Yes they get the traffic on the day of publication and may result in higher unique users as more non-regular visitors come to your site attracted by the bait, but that doesn't necessarily mean they attract many links that last - and this is how you get long term sustainable traffic.

Good articles that last are often just as relevant two years after publication as they were when they were written. These can continue picking up links from external sites long after the popular story about a high profile celebrity is forgotten about.

I DO think that journalists need to be incentivised on different metrics as writing for the web is a different matter to writing for offline publications BUT part of this strategy needs to take into account your long term link building strategy and the importance of building up a number of resource articles in your web archive.

One way out of this fall into popularity contests is the 'top rated article' box that some sites (such as the register) have started to employ but i still don't think this is the perfect solution as some of the best articles and those that get the most links are the ones that polarise opinion. It's clear that publishing still hasn't quite grasped the potential of the internet.

Related posts
BBC increase most read stories to top 10
Manipulate the BBC's most emailed stories

Digital editions should be killed

Digital editions don't provide the functionality of a website and you are wasting your content by using them.

What are they?
Digital editions are online magazines that physically look like a print magazine.



These have been on the scene for many years but I've so far managed to ignore them and tried to convince others to do so too. I've never had a specific reason for this dislike beyond the feeling that doing something that looks like it's offline online seems wrong. To be honest I'd thought they'd go away but they haven't, in fact they seem just as popular as ever.

So I've recently been looking at them in more depth, well if advertisers are willing to spend money on them and people are willing to read them or even pay for them then i can't ignore them.

Examples include the lad's mag Monkey (NSFW) and a whole host of print titles which you can get in digital magazine format (men's health, business week, hello...). They come in two main types - reader-based and browser-based - the former requiring a download and the other online (with the use of flash).

No search engine indexation
My first problem with digital magazines is their inability to function with search engines. They are flash, Google doesn't like flash. However I'd heard that some suppliers of browser-based digital magazines are also providing a HTML page for each flash page so allowing the magazine to be indexed by Google. I wanted to find out more.

So i rang up a digital magazine supplier (CEROS) and battled through the sales spiel until i was passed to a technical member of their team to properly explain what they did to produce this page and what it looked like. I learnt that they are just outputting the PDF (which is what a digital magazine is made from to begin with, and flash graphics and animation is added in later) to HTML. Simple!

Well yes and no. Simple is what it does - it just takes the text in the PDF and puts it into a HTML page that looks like a simple text file. Not pretty but does the job - some of it will be indexed. All the flash content put in after this process (such as animations) won't have any HTML equivalent unless you type it in yourself.

Normal digital edition page	HTML digital edition page (click to enlarge) Yes, it is black text on a grey background but then i guess it is for search engines only...

This is essentially hacking apart a PDF file to turn it into a website. The time and energy doing this would seem better spent copying and pasting every page into notepad and saving every image and then creating a website with the functionality of, well a website.

Update: Google now indexes flash, this doesn't change my opinions though.

Recreating offline experiences
Why shouldn't you recreate offline experiences online? Well the following are my reasons why and I'm not alone:

• Zooming: If you want to read you have to zoom in to the page and move the page around - This seems ridiculous when you can fit an article with images on a well designed webpage and see it without any zooming, just a scrolling down of the page to read more.
• It's not interactive: The beauty of the internet is its interactivity. You can't comment on digital magazines (mostly), it's difficult to link to it, you can't print it without using up all your ink.
• It's a dead end: The internet is a city and you surf from website to website like you would walk from house to house. Digital magazines don't share this world, they're a web cul-de-sac.
• Where do you go from here? Your digital magazine is a static screenshot. They'll be no dynamic links on the side of your digital magazine articles linking to newer articles. Once it's done it's done.
• Usage: Why would i want to flick through a virtual magazine with turning pages? I know I'm online, I realise this is a computer and I'm looking at a screen.
• Browser function: Digital magazines are flash - you can't press the back button on explorer when you turn a page and want to go back.
• Accessibility: I'm not sure how accessible these are but looking at the HTML page i'm not hopeful

Longevity
Content is king online. Good content will gain links over time, the more good content in your website the better you will perform in searches. More good content = more good links = higher Google ranking. But if you are putting your fantastic content into a format that is not as compatible with Google as a normal HTML web page and it doesn't lend itself to being linked to you are wasting that content.

So if you're thinking about using digital editions only use it if you want something short term - it may well provide instant hits when emailed out, and immediate revenue from advertisers excited by its interactivity. But long term, putting good content in a search engine friendly format will gain exponentially more hits over time and building relationships with advertisers on your website may well provide more revenue over time.

Pretend to be Tom Cruise with Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Surface is like that screen computer that Cruise uses in Minority Report. Except it's horizontal and you don't get to wear a glove.

At prices starting around the £3000 mark it's not quite consumer friendly but i'm hoping these will start springing up in public places in the next few years so we can see whether they work as well as that video makes out. Only through use will we actually discover if they provide a benefit.

I can't at the moment see how placing two phones on Microsoft Surface and shifting e-photos visually is any easier than selecting the photos on someone's phone and bluetoothing to another. Although an easier way to split the bill will be nice, will it stop stingy friends though?

Hopefully there will be a way of customising Microsoft Surface to understand what you want just from the actions you do. For example, it's 8am in the morning and you place a bowl of cereal on the table - Surface navigates to the breakfast news; it's 11pm you place a cup of tea on the table - it navigates to a football website; it's 11pm you put two cups of tea on the table - it plays romantic music.

It can't be long before people develop video games for Microsoft Surface, air hockey would work well, shove ha'penny would be even better. And from the marketing perspective it could be a way of advertisers really understanding their consumers. For example, a consumer places the book they're reading on the table, it surreptitiously scans the barcode and then shows adverts related to that subject matter. Much hilarity will then ensue when you try and fix the advertising by selectively putting different books on the table.

I found a hotel press release about using Microsoft Surface in hotel rooms that states you can pay for things 'all with the drop of a credit card'. If Microsoft Surface works by just placing a credit card on it you'll have to be very careful where you put things down. You're tired, you get in to your room, you drop your wallet on the table, bam! You've bought a massage and a continental breakfast.

Now watch Tom Cruise using it, with a glove:

Don't let Google boss your website around

Google have always been good at creating a business model where previously it didn't exist, or if it did, doing it better.

Online advertising was always a bit of a dog until Google came along with AdWords in 2000, now AdWords is it's major revenue source.

With Google's unique ability for making money where no one else is looking, web professionals need to be wary about what Google is up to. If Google do introduce any new Beta offerings or alter the specifications of current offerings they'll do so on the quiet.

Google site search
Recently a quiet change to Google site search has been making waves in the web community (more examples of this). Many will know Google site search as something you can do in the main Google search, eg. input "site:http://themeaningofweb.blogspot.com/ seo" into Google and you will search this blog for all instances of the word 'seo'. The change Google has made is by automatically including the site search in it's results listings (see image below). The worry amongst website owners is that users will now search your site for what they want on Google before even getting to your site. This may reduce your visitors, discourage user visits to your home page and worst of all place Google AdWords on the search results page.

Savvy website owners need to be well aware of Google activity and i encourage them to fight Google if you feel you've been hard done by. Amazon.com have recently done just that to prevent site search appearing next to their search listing.

All this innovation by Google works both ways. Clever individuals and companies can make money out of Google.

ACAP
One major new business model being developed that amongst other things attempts to give publishers payments for the use of their news stories is ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol). ACAP in its simplest form will provide rights information (DRM) for all articles, news items, images, videos etc on a publishers website that can be read by a machine, such as the Google News spider - I'm not exactly sure of the mechanics of it but it will be an extension of the robots.txt file.

Google are reluctant to embrace ACAP as they believe current robots files are sufficient. Considering ACAP seeks to provide some limits to how information is used on the web I'm sure that this is not the only factor causing Google's reticence.

If ACAP, or something similar and maybe less restrictive, does take off and Google comes round to the idea (or is forced to by legislation) then publishers could find themselves making a lot of money.

The web is changing as businesses become more aware of the capabilities of the internet - there are more publishers and website owners out there than search engines and without us what would the search engines search?

Related pages
Should Google News pay publishers for their content?

Stop pop-ups popping up, online advertising needs to evolve

The best advertising is stuff that's relevant to people and makes the best use of the format it's on.

(I know that some intensely annoying adverts do sometimes work, such as the Michael Winner Esure 'don't panic dear, it's just a commercial', which force the name into the forefront of your mind due to it p*ssing you off. However i'm going to gloss over these as it's not an avenue of marketing i ever intend to get involved with. There's something intensely crass about starting a relationship with your customers by being obnoxious.)

Best TV ads? - Well the ones that use the fact that you can produce film quality video, that people appreciate humour, that people want to be emotionally involved and that people channel hop. I'm thinking the Honda cog advert, most of the Guiness adverts, iconic adverts like Hovis and Flake.

Best radio ads? - Ones that punch through the airwaves, good examples are anything with clever humour. It's so easy to ignore a radio ad so they need to pull you in.

Magazine, cinema, billboards? - I'm sure you can think of your own.

The above i hope shows the importance of adapting to the medium.

Web? Well this is where it get's fun.

Starting off with 'traditional' online advertising. A banner ad that is static is essentialy what every ad in a newspaper is, it doesn't move, it's an image, you look at it or more likely ignore it. Online ads are evolving now, a good example are expandable ads (please leave a comment if this link is dead and i'll find another example). Now these sit like a banner till you put your mouse over them. In theory they let the user choose to interact. Other types of web advertising such as pop ups, floating ads, takeovers are the web equivalent of Michael Winner. Even expandable ads can be annoying when you accidentally hover your mouse over them.

The future? - Well despite this banners ads are here to stay. For the same reason that there are still rubbish sofa ads on TV, boring adverts on the radio and invisible adverts in magazines, somebody (sharp suit, pink shirt, drinks Stella, you know the type) somewhere will always be using the previously mentioned web ad options.

Clickthrough rates are on average 0.4% these days and this falls to 0.04% on Facebook (social networking ad tips article). Unless you're getting monumental site traffic, clever web advertisers (jeans, t-shirt, converse trainers, drinks tea) need to ditch banners and start getting innovative.

There are ways; some are downright scary visions of privacy invasion, others are mild and welcoming, like a bowl of tomato soup.

1. Targeted advertising - We know so much about people that they can be targeted on their likes and dislikes. For example, my facebook profile contains my favourite films. An example targeted ad campaign would be Amazon displaying an advert on my home page, specifically targeted at me, selling the latest special edition DVD releases of these films i've added to my profile. This i believe is one of those scary invasions of privacy, but it's already happening so be wary, advertisers should atleast give people the choice (Google take notice!)
   
   
2. Contextual advertising - You write a blog article or review about a certain book, Amazon then places an advert on your page offering that book (here's one i made earlier). Similarly, some websites use advertisers that highlight certain words on their page.
   
   For example the sentence:
   "And JK Rowling earned 3 squillion pounds from Harry Potter"
   would become
   "And JK Rowling earned 3 squillion pounds from Harry Potter".
   
   Go look at an article on the BBC, how many words in that article could potentially link to an advertising opportunity? Again, this isn't a fave option of mine as it's too invasive
   
   
3. Part one. Engaging with the user - Ah, my favourite, 'tomato soup' option. Sites such as facebook invite advertisers to engage users by doing things such as creating applications. You can play the Red Bull Roshambull 'scissors, paper, stones' game on Facebook - Here Red Bull get some advertising, you've chosen to engage with them and everyone is happy.
   
   This is the way advertising should be in the future, brands work with you, and NOT just by sponsoring something - that's the lazy way. That means less advertising, but better advertising. More performance per ad pound spent for less ads and more engagement.
   
   
4. Part two. Provide something for the user - The same as above really, let the users come to you by not annoying them and being engaging. A good example is the recent Cadbury TV ad, they added it to YouTube, people created spoofs, the brand lives on. Same thing with the Dove advert. I know this is more viral marketing than online advertising but the boundaries between the two need to be blurred.

Enough of taking offline principles and applying them online, let the web revolution begin!

Related posts
YouTube, Facebook, BBC and Reuters discuss social media (Feb 09)
Monitor the online buzz around your brand (May 09)
What is the average click through rate for online banner ads? (Jul 09)