Some people that I talk to are pessimistic about online advertising.  “Banners don’t work” was a famous quip from a young media guy I once worked with.  In my experience, he was partially right.  Bad banners don’t work. 

But what is a “bad banner?”  Like anything else, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.  But clearly defining what you are trying to accomplish is the most important step:  Begin with the end in mind.  Bad banners do not do this.

Are you trying to generate traffic?  Do you have a conversion goal you are trying to reach?  Do you simply want to increase awareness?  Each of these goals could potentially suggest a different approach for creative, execution, and media placement.

• Traffic Generation:  Laugh if you will, but there are genuinely some times when pure traffic is all that matters.  I don’t deal much with clients that have this need, but they are out there.  This is a good strategy for let’s say “distasteful” products that are always going to appeal to a certain percentage of all viewers.  The good news for these advertisers is that this is a pure numbers game.  Buy your media on the cheap, whip out some “catchy” image based creative, and run the least expensive campaign you can.  Cost cutting is the major goal when planning these campaigns. 

• Conversion Goals:  These campaigns can be very challenging.  The mistake I often see made for this type of goal is advertisers that try to play a numbers game and just shove as many clicks into their conversion pipe as possible without using the banner ad to qualify traffic first. In my experience, the best strategy for generating conversions from banner advertising is to clearly communicate the end goal in the advertising.  Another common mistake I see many marketers make when attempting to drive conversion is thinking only about the advertising and not the full conversion process.  Does your target landing page echo and match your advertising?  Are you clearly making the connection between the flow of the banner and the flow of your conversion page(s)?  The more considered the conversion decision, the more clearly connected to the end goal that the banner message needs to be.  By doing this, you will end up with lower CTR; but a much higher conversion rate and ultimately more conversions than you would have by just trying to maximize your CTR, and then playing the percentages for your conversion.  

• Awareness goals:  Perhaps you are introducing a new product or service and simply want to make people more aware through brand engagement.  If so, why spend all of your banner messaging begging for a click?  I see this misused tactic all over the web.  The better approach, in my opinion, is to use rich media to bring your branded content and messages to the user where they are.  Users invest time and effort to reach the content they are consuming; it is understandable that they are reluctant to click your banner to move to your content.  Using expandable units, or flash IMUs, you can in short order bring your messaging in full to your user within the page that they are reluctant to leave.  In a recent campaign we ran simple CTR focused flash banners driving users to a brand engagement micro site against a series of both expandable and IMU units that brought much of the micro site’s content into the ads.  In a head to head comparison, we found that per user brand engagement (time spent engaged with branded messages) was 40% higher for those users exposed to the content rich banners, rather than those exposed to the simple banners that click through to a branded micro site.

Of course, there are many other factors in play.  But thinking through your banner strategy with the end in mind is the first, and most important, step in ensuring you have a successful online campaign.