buckworks - 11:14 pm on Oct 1, 2009 (gmt 0)

Good banners can be about branding AND sales.

Banners which are well designed and well placed can do quite all right in terms of direct sales.

I just checked September's stats for some AdWords banner campaigns that the client intends to expand. One set of banners which featured a specific product had a CTR of .55% and a conversion rate of 1.88% for September. That's lower than the conversion for search (text) ads for the same product but higher than for text ads on the content network. It's quite worthwhile to run the banners for direct sales; increased brand awareness is almost a bonus.

We take a more granular approach than just circulating generic banners about our "widgets". We have banners about widget couplers to target pages that are relevant to widget couplers; banners about widget intensifiers to target pages that are relevant to widget intensifiers, and so on.

We do run generic widget banners, of course, but we try to balance our campaigns so that if a page is relevant to a specific widget the individual product banner would get precedence.

We've estimated that perhaps 1 in 200 people would be in need of our widgets in any particular year, so it behooves us to target carefully. A "plaster banners everywhere" approach would likely be an ineffective use of resources.