I was talking to someone the other day and explaining exactly what my job entails and as soon as I got round to explaining display advertising I was met with a barrage of questions about whether banner advertising was a dying medium and whether people even looked at the banner adverts online and so I felt inspired to write this blog post.
Let’s start with how online advertising is doing today. The IAB has released the Full Year 2011 Internet Advertising Spend report which highlights some really interesting points. Did you know that 2011 saw a record online adspend of £4.8 billion, which is a 14.4% growth.
So, how does display fit in to this landscape? Display advertising accounted for 24% of this market, compared to paid for search with 58% and classified at 16%. Display advertising surpassed the £1 billion barrier for the first time and it looks like it’s set to continue this trend.
To address the question of whether banner adverts work, I can assure you that they do. Banner advertising is not usually what drives the final conversion though, it helps other, direct response campaigns you may have running. Think of it a little bit like passing the ball to your team mate in a football match, so they can score the goal. Display advertising passes the lead to your search campaign to score the conversion.
A study by Yahoo! and Comscore showed that search campaigns saw an uplift of 22% on average, when combined with a display campaign. This means that people are not only looking at the display advertising, it is having the desired impact.
Hopefully display advertising is set to continue to grow and as a part of that, pop-up are set to become extinct in favour of higher quality, more relevant, richer forms of non-intrusive display advertising.
