Biggest mistake in online banner advertising
We manage a lot of online display advertising and have talked with you a lot about the different types of banner advertising and creative executions. However, we haven’t yet covered the one downfall of many online ad campaigns – Failing to set a cap on the number of impressions per person.
This is probably the biggest mistake we see other agencies, clients and brands make. The problem is, if you don’t put a cap on the number of impressions per person, you can easily keep serving the same ad and the same message to the same person over and over. You risk the chance of annoying your potential customer – never the goal of an advertising campaign.
There is no magic number, but we cap most of our messages at five. If someone doesn’t react to our message by then, chances are they never will. We move on and put those dollars toward another consumer.
There are many who make this mistake, but some of the worst offenders I have noticed are West Elm and AT&T. Know of any others?
I see this all the time and think the same exact thing!
I love Sierra Trading Post but sometimes I’ll get the same ad five or more times a day. It’s annoying for me and it certainly isn’t budget friendly for them.
Anthropologie, Bluefly, Puma and quite a few other retailers also use this service… As someone privy to this process the banners are browse triggered, you visit a section of the site and it shows you a relevant advertisement pulling subject matter from that section. Generally it keeps showing you the same ad because you’re probably visiting the same section of the site repeatedly. In regards to all of the other retailers, you may not be seeing their ads because you may not be visiting their sites. It’s not the retailers fault just weird logic.
Kelly, I’ll have to visit Sierra Trading Post and test it out.
Anon, thanks for the insight!