Fluffy Clouds Blog - Experts in Education Marketing

At Fluffy Clouds, we put education-focussed banner ads on education websites. We get better click-through rates than the big ad boys – you know the ones I mean. This is, we believe, because our campaigns are targetted to the specific audience of the websites who display our ads – all good…

So…when I saw this article I was a little concerned…it’s called ‘Is Online Banner Advertising Dying?’

Take a look at the pretty pie charts and things.

Between July 2007 and March 2009, banner ad non-clickers increased from 68% to 84%.

Oh dear. However, reading further, there are demographics and age stats but the one which caught my eye was Click Through Rates – as they say on the post, this is arguably the most important parameter of all.

As you can see, information/education has the largest share of click throughs of all banner ads.

Well, it made me happy anyway!

What do you think? Is it time to ditch banner ads? I don’t think so – Fluffy Clouds still get great CTR!

image credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheilascarborough/ / CC BY 2.0

Online advertising overtakes TV advertising

When I saw the tweets which pointed to the online Telegraph piece, my first reaction was, “Great – we can use this!”

You’ve probably seen the article at Telegraph.co.uk http://bit.ly/42BTmh but is this useful information for online advertisers or those considering adding online ads to their sites?

Acording to the study, ‘Internet’ advertising share is 23.5% while ‘Television’ received 21.9% of revenue. At the same time, overall advertising spend reduced by 16%.

Of course, this is spend, and says nothing about what actually works in advertising. If advertisers are abandoning TV are they actually getting value-for-money out of online advertising instead?

Reading further, display ads are said to be performing well against more traditional forms of advertising but we need to see the evidence of this in hard data.

I suppose this is what I am saying -

there is a danger in using articles such as this one to justify online advertising.

Is this headline is a rallying cry for everyone to shift to online advertising? This article is not, in itself, an academic study of the effectiveness of different forms of advertising. If we want to influence advertisers, we need to be basing our assertions on cold, hard evidence.

So what do you think?

5 reasons to have targeted advertising on your education blog or web site

1. Get money to keep going

If your site or blog is popular, you’ll want to keep it running and develop what you offer to other passionate educationalists. Once you reach a certain level, you can’t do that without money. Running targeted ads brings you more revenue than mass banner ad companies.

2. Give your visitors stuff they like and want

Visitors actually like to see ads which offer them suff they are interested in – they tend to be turned off by generic, untargeted ads which they can see on any old site. Targeted ads will wncourage visitors to return as it improves their total visit experiennce. “I visited that maths site I like and found a link to a brilliant resource for my Interactive Whiteboard – I bought it for my class and they love it!”

3. Look more professional

Badly placed ads can ruin a site’s design (or make it even worse than it was). However, used appropriately, a professionally-designed ad from a top educational supplier or oganisation can actually enhance the look of any page. Nobody likes to see a site with loads of ads running at the top, on the left and right making the whole thing look untidy but a carefully-positioned, professional-looking ad from a relevant and useful source can give a real touch of class.

4. Make connections with top educational suppliers and national education organisations

Targeted ads are run on fewer sites and the advertisers always know where their ads are running – and they visit to see how they look. This is a great way to let top companies and national organisations know who you are and what you are getting up to – who knows where that could lead?

5. Stay in control of what appears on your site

The whole point of running tageted ads is that you have total control of the ads which appear on your site. Mass ad companies can’t give you that. You can always refuse to run a campaign you don’t like – it’s your site after all!

……………………………………………………………………………………………

So what’s it to be? Random ads or targeted ads?

Make sense? Get in touch with Richard – richard@fluffyclouds.co.uk and he’ll sort you out.

fluffy clouds

Fluffy Clouds Advent Calendar of links

Click through rates still high for education ads?

Online advertising overtakes TV advertising

5 reasons to have targeted advertising on your education blog or web site

1. Get money to keep going

2. Give your visitors stuff they like and want

3. Look more professional

4. Make connections with top educational suppliers and national education organisations

5. Stay in control of what appears on your site

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