We are sharing a video that Moz released a couple of weeks ago titled “The #1 Reason Paid Ads (On Search, Social, and Display) Fail”.
Click the image below to watch the video:
The reason we think it's important is that it touches on something we have personally seen over, and over again.
It’s a cycle that repeats itself, leads to failed campaigns, ruined relationships, and can potentially cost people their jobs.
I would add to the video that the way I have seen this fail the most spectacularly is when people invest heavily in display (banner ads) expecting them to work a certain way.
People tend to think that users will see a banner ad, click on that banner ad, land on a website and make a purchase.
The banner ad reality is:
The average viewability (an industry term meaning the banner was actually visible on a webpage) is around 50%. Yes, only 50% of the banner ads that are paid for are actually seen by a human being.
The average CTR on a banner ad is 0.10%. That’s 10 people clicking out of 10,000 ads served.
Display ads whether purchased programmatically, or directly are heavily affected by bots. Bots effectively eat up the impressions that are being served - using up budget for no real return.
Display ads can show up on all kinds of low-quality websites unless you are diligent about excluding them.
A few ideas on what to do about it:
Make paid and organic search your marketing foundation (note that this doesn’t always apply… especially in extremely expensive and competitive areas).
Think about your marketing as more of of a journey than a single interaction. Setup your marketing efforts to be sustainable over the long-run and don’t ‘hail mary’ your marketing budget on unproven advertising strategies.
Add value for your audience to get their attention first, sell to them second.
Start small and test. Scale up on what’s working and stop what’s not working.
Use tracking and attribution tools as much as possible.
We hope you find this useful, as always please send us any questions or feedback that you have.