Wednesday, May 28, 2014

My Name is Meghan, and I click on Banner Ads.

SO I study Advertising Design at the lovely Ringling College of Art and Design, and I guess you could say I'm a fan of good advertising. I'm also a fan of strong strategy, and if there's one thing I learned last year it's this: Millennials really hate banner ads. I can't remember the percentage exactly, but I was doing some research last year for media planning and it was something like...99.2% of Women 18-25 highly dislike banner ads. The average click-through rate of ads on Buzzfeed is a little more than 1%, which is nearly 25 times higher than the average click-through rate of normal banner ads. So basically, nobody clicks on them.

Except for me. I click on all of them.

I'm pretty sure I am that 0.00000000000000025% of the population who clicks on ads that are blatantly sponsored ads. And it's not like they're even good ones, it's not something innovative or well designed that really deserves clicking on it. It's usually this:
Like, literally every time
Or some variation. There was a period of months where I'd click on the same ad of the same dress every time, then remember that the page was a maternity clothing website, then get mad and do the same thing like a week later. It really messed up the targeting of the ads I got because it seemed like I was pregnant.

I'm not really sure what makes me click on them. Okay well it's probably the dresses. I really like dresses. All of the dresses. But like, even things NOT about clothes or nail polish (Freakin' Julep can see into my soul, I swear), I'll find myself clicking on them. Like "HMM I WONDER IF I NEED AN ARCHERY SET????" It feels counterintuitive since I  LITERALLY STUDY THIS, but hey... look at this dress.

If you need me I'll be online window shopping.



1 comment:

  1. Interesting! Perhaps you are the only one who does. But statistically, most big companies get a majority of their web traffic through affiliate partner ad banners. It is worth looking into it, one of the major players in the affiliate space is Comission Junction : https://www.cj.com/

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