Banner Ad Relevance for Customer Acquisition

Recently banner ads have become more sophisticated in their ability to deliver. From the outset banner ads have had trouble with relevance. For example, an ad for shaving cream is shown on oxygen.com (a website for women). The ad isn't relevant to the audience that is coming to that website. So, the audience has become accustomed to ignoring banner ads. To make matters worse, many website owners piled all the banner ads into one area creating a nascar effect. This makes it easy for the user to ignore all of the ads at once and deem them all irrelevant.

Over time banner ad performance for Internet marketing has decreased. It's required many Internet marketing agencies to contract with specific websites for targeted positions. Recently, many of the banner ad networks, listed here, have added features helping to target the ads. You can show ads only to those people who have already been to a particular website (indicating likelihood of relevance) and repeat buyers.

However, the same problems plague many banner ad networks. They don't have the control needed for customer acquisition. Search engines continue to provide a very relevant environment for customer acquisition. And until the banner ad networks can solve this problem, they will continue to perform poorly for customer acquisition.

As a branding exercise and for brand awareness, banner ads can still provide an effective choice. And if you can find the correct destination website, they can provide a source of traffic that search engines can't match. When they provide better insight into their network and segmentation of the users in the network, I'll let you know.