UPDATED: April 10, 2012
AdSafe study shows that a quarter of display ads are never in view on publishers’ websites. And it gets worse from there — 41% never in view for content networks and 46% never in view for ad exchanges. Users are there to view content, not ads. And they are conditioned to avoid the top, right side, and bottoms of web pages (see eye tracking at the bottom of this post).
Image Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1008965
ORIGINAL POST: March 25, 2011
Hands down, search ads beat display ads in click through rates (CTRs). In every one of the examples below and the several dozen more that I did not screen shot, search is more effective than display because the ads are brought up when the user types in the search term and are looking for something, vs display which is served up alongside content.
Facebook display advertising click through rates are even sadder (i.e. worse) as you can see from the chart below — like an order of magnitude
lower (0.024%)
digital display vs search ads
Eye tracking studies show that most users are already conditioned to avoid looking at the top and right side of web pages because they know that is where banner ads or display ads go.
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