Does click-through matter?

As far back as the turn of the century, there were people saying it doesn't. But over and over again, I see clients evaluating online campaigns for click-through rates. But in many cases, the ads themselves are not designed to generate clicks.

Here's the problem — there are two basic kinds of banner ads out there:

1) Awareness/branding

These ads are really just billboards on the (I cringe as I type this) "information superhighway". They act just like outdoor ads, because they only want to make you aware of a new movie, basic message, or consumer brand.



This is pure branding. They don't really need you to do anything besides look, and realize that this is part of an integrated campaign.

2) Direct marketing

These ads are the junk mail of the Internet. They show up uninvited on your homepage, and they want to entice you to act. "Punch the monkey and win a prize!" "Find your best insurance rate!" "Meet hot singles in your area!" Or maybe just finish up your education.



If these ads seem more lurid and crass, it's because they are. Direct marketing is designed to get you to act, and the creative will use any trick in the book to get you to open that envelope — or in this case, to click the ad. They're like a desperate salesman with his foot in the door. Billboards, on the other hand, can take a higher road — whatever the medium.

Both kinds of banner ads are valid marketing strategies, but they can become marketing tragedies if you don't know which kind of banner your ad is supposed to be.

This is something that's particularly difficult in government social marketing, when the message is simple enough to be effectively communicated in a flash, but the campaign is evaluated on how many users click though "for more information".

Billboard or junk mail? It's your call. But you have to make the right one early on, before your objectives come back to haunt you.

The mile high club

British Internet marketers Joe Trinder and Sam Kendall are getting married. Big deal, eh? But the way they're raising money for the wedding kind of is.

From their FAQ:

Joe thought of the idea one sunny summers day when realising he wanted to make a name for himself on the world wide web as it dawned on him he couldn’t save for the wedding he and his girlfriend Sam dreamed of, especially as the credit crunch of 2009 was pulling tighter. He knew he needed a new idea on the Internet, something that had not been done before and something slightly mad. The result was what you see on the homepage now. A mile of advertising banners. A real mile.

The result is Mile Long Advertising, a collection of online banner ads, stacked one on top of another, with the intention of making a web page a mile deep. (And yes — it takes forever to load!)

The press release gives more detail:

The billboard is made up of over 5300 individual Internet banners advertising thousands of brands, websites, businesses, blogs and individuals and totals
160,934.4 centimetres in length. In other words, should you print the image to scale, it would run a whole mile.

...

Each advertiser has a banner that measures 200 x 1057 pixels. There are a total of 5365 banners lined up together, meaning the whole billboard image stretches 5,670,805 pixels in length. That's the equivalent of three and a half Empire State Buildings tall!

According to the couple's blog, they're a quarter of the way there.

Ad rates vary from $99 to $275 USD,ranging from 200x1057 to 200x1057 pixels. From what's up there now, they seem to be attracting a decent assortment of brands from around the world.




But is it worthwhile? Here's their pitch:

Because your website or business will have a full sized banner advertising you as well as a link to your site from our homepage which should potentially be seen by millions of people over the coming years.

We guarantee you place indefinitely and the site will be there for at least 10 years, though we aim to have it online forever. You really will be making Internet history.

Also $99 for a vertical banner is a very cheap method of advertising.

Joe and Sam also claim that a portion of the profits will be donated to UNICEF, Red Cross, WWF, RSPCA and Cancer Research. But the site is light on details.

I'm not rushing out to suggest to my clients that they put their ad on a mile-long browser killer. The clutter on a regular advertising page is noise enough. But here's hoping the happy couple get what they wish for.