Internet advertising doesn’t work
Internet advertising doesn’t work! Bold statement, I know, but I’m willing to back it up.
First, let’s get clear about what I mean when I say ‘Internet advertising’. I’m talking about those annoying banner ad type things that destroy too many good sites. I’m not talking about Pay per Click as served by Google. That’s a whole different article for the future.
Now we’re clear, I’m basically talking Internet advertising in the form of banner ads. They can be static, they can be dynamic, and they can pop-up when you visit a site, but they can’t give you a good return on investment. I think of these as being Internet advertising because they follow the same rules as offline advertising. You put something in front of a potential customer and hope they respond to it.
The problem with this form of advertising is there’s simply too much of it. How much do you actually pay attention to this old fashioned form of advertising now? Sometimes a TV ad will catch your eye but does that mean you know what the product is or you will actually buy it. Cast your mind back to earlier this year with the Bruce Lee “be like water my friend” ad. What was it selling? From my quick investigation about 10% of people get it right, despite everyone knowing the ad.
So take this phenomenon of ignored advertising and apply it to the Internet. You’ll find even more people ignore your Internet advertising campaign over other channels. The Internet is user driven, and users never wanted to sit through endless advertising. Hence, when they have control, they simply ignore it all together.
The way you pay for these ads is by how many times they are served on pages i.e. how many users they are displayed in front of. So if your ad is shown to 1000 people, and everyone ignores it, how many sales do you get?
The solution, stop paying for this type of Internet advertising! Invest your hard earned money in new generation marketing and advertising techniques. Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is currently the trend on the Internet and I’ll be talking about that more in the future. But don’t dismiss the other, more time consuming techniques, such as Search Engine Optimization and Viral Marketing campaigns. If done correctly, these can pay off big for some initial investment and continue to pay off long after you opened your wallet.
So remember, Internet advertising is dead! So look for other methods of driving traffic to your website. And don’t forget to do something with it when it’s there!
And by the way, the Bruce Lee commercial was for BMW…in case you were wondering.
