The Background

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Do you know your money is wasted...

Web advertising should be valued in terms of the value of the business it creates from the new users it attracts to your site. This value is usually very small, which is why Web advertising works poorly and will be one of the smallest contributors to the future of the Web.

Simple click-through is usually in the 1% range,
meaning that 99% of the people seeing an ad don't even bother clicking on it.

It is amazing how little most Web ads work at attracting clicks: they should recognise that they are one end of a hypertext link and that they have to create expectations as to the value of going to the other end of the link. This is called the rhetoric of departure in hypertext theory.

The other end of the ad's hypertext link is the pay-off page. Most often, these pages are highly disappointing and cause the user to back out immediately. This is why even click-through is a poor measure of the value of Web ads since it measures the alluring quality of your creative and not the ad's ability to deliver business.

Marketing That Works

A survey of people who had actually bought things on the Web discovered that only 12% of buying customers had arrived at the vendor's site from an advertisement - 88% of the shoppers had navigated there in other ways.

Search engines and hypertext links are the most important mechanisms: offer content-rich pages, and other sites will link to you. You can encourage such linking by including appropriate URLs in your press releases and other PR efforts. Always include a URL in your print advertising (and remember to link to a pay-off page that follows up on the message in the ad; never link to your home page).

UPSIDE Magazine stated that the click through rate is now 0.7%, that branding doesn't work on the Web, and that the only success stories are eCommerce sites where people can buy stuff.

The click through rate has now dropped to 0.5% according to NetRatings: click through has been cut in half during the year since.