You wasted $9.7 billion on unseen online ads? WHAT?!
Coming from the Online Advertising world to the Social Media Agency world was a bit of a jump, but there are many more similarities than you’d think. The most common thread is that it’s all about relevancy – making sure the most relevant message is placed in front of the most relevant individuals.
Thinking about this theme of relevancy – I couldn’t help but take a moment to pause when I came across an article from Clickz, noting that 31% of display ads go unseen. Let’s do some quick math here… According to eMarketer’s forecasts for 2011 – 2015 the US spent approximately $31.3 billion on online ads in 2011.
$31.3 billion * .31 = $9.7 billion online display advertising dollars down the drain!!!!
The article mentions that one of the main causes why these ads go unseen is that they are placed on parts of websites that are not viewed by the users. We’re talking about “below the fold” ads or ads in locations that someone won’t easily see — not to mention other reasons such as slow loading times, mobile devices/tablets or computer screen resolution (think of the vast difference between 600 x 400 vs. 1280 x 1024).
Now I’m not one to go jumping to conclusions, and yes I may be slightly biased, but it seems to me that $9.7 billion spent on unseen ads might go to better use somewhere else – like social media. It appears however that I’m not alone here, as there are a number of studies coming out in support of social concept advertising.
To further confirm this point, let’s look at a social advertising. You know you have seen countless statistics about individuals considering the product input/recommendations of their friends and family above almost anything else – in fact, more than 3 in 4 (78%) consumers trust peer recommendations, whereas only 14% trust ads. Facebook’s sponsored stories proves that these recommendations make a difference in ad recall, purchase intent and awarenessbased on advertising with a social concept versus those that do not.
Given this data, it seems like a no brainer that social, leveraging relevancy and the power of peer influence, seems to be the most effective place to think about reallocating $9.7 billion. End of day, to really draw a line in the sand here and prove social media ROI we need to take a stab at redefining KPIs and success metrics for Social Media, but that is for another time and blog post.
Bottom line – even if we haven’t figured out the exact ROI formula, you can’t really do any worse than spending money on something that no one will see….
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/you-wasted-9-7-billion-on-unseen-online-ads-what/