5 Reasons Why Your Display Advertising Is Not Working

Are you one of those advertiser, who is struggling to understand why your Display Advertising is not providing the desired results?  If answer is yes, then this post is for you. Below are 4 most common reasons why your display advertising might not be working.

1. Ad Views: According to a study by Sticky,  77% of ads are never seen by people. Even when the ad is considered viewable, meaning it is within viewing area, only 55% ads are actually viewable. Which results in a very lower click through rate, the average banner CTR is about 0 .1% and declining.
2. Spider and Bot Ad Clicks:  Spider and bots, instead of humans, make up a significant amount of clicks on the ads. All these spiders do is click on an ad, land on your site and then leave causing millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks.  As a result you will either see a very high bounce rate on your pages and/or mismatch in the clicks reported by ad network and visits reported by your Web Analytics solution.  In 2012, a start-up reported that about 80% of their clicks from Facebook ads were by spiders. Another study found that 20% -90% of clicks on some sites were via spiders. I also showed an example of a bot in my post, 4 Reason Why Your Bounce Rate Might Be Wrong
3. Fat Finger: Over 35% of the ad clicks on Mobile are by accident, again causing high Bounce Rate.
4. Mismatched Landing Experience:  Make it a seamless and consistent experience from your banner to conversion. Users don’t have time so make it right the moment they land on your site. For example, If a banner ad promotes “Free Trial” then make sure landing page make it easy for user to sign up for the free trial. Don’t expect the users to click through to your site to find where the “Free Trail” page is.  Mismatched landing page and ad experience leads to High Bounce Rate and Low Conversion Rate.
5. Site Speed: Slow site speed breaks visitors flow from a display ad to your site. If it takes too long for the page to load then the visitor will be gone before she sees the full page.  In this case you will see a clicks but not visits and/or high bounce rate.