CopyDiva

I was inspired today to write about social media advertising today after reading two other posts. One tweeted by Peter Kim, commenting that a 7% click through rate for an online ad is really 93% waste for the company that buys it.  The other, from the content and blogger perspective, by Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim. Andy touches on the fact that pricing for display ads sold through ad networks (and, this is typically how bloggers get ad revenue) have dropped again, to below $0.30 on average.

For advertisers, the drop in pricing is certainly good news, because that means they get more ads from their ad budget. Is it really worth the spend though?

The drop in rates can certainly be blamed on the bad economic news, and you bet that lots of folks will blame it on that. But, from the ad networks folks that I’ve talked to, companies have big expectations for click-throughs that are never realized. Click-throughs rates are tiny, and there’s evidence that people who click through are not your target audience anyway. Plus, we know there’s plenty of evidence that people ignore display ads, meaning they don’t even look at them. Behavioral targeting technology just isn’t perfect either and since people ignore ads, is there really a point in better targeting for more ads that people will just ignore?

Then there’s the issue of the click-through being only the last touchpoint, and the only one that gets measured. True, but eyetracking studies for display ads show (sorry to be redundant) that people don’t look at display ads on the web except in search mode. This is why PPC does work.

When will we all just get sick of the entire idea of social media advertising?