WhatRunsWhere tracks the ads that your competitors are running. Earlier this year, we highlighted MixRank, a similar service.
WhatRunsWhere and its ilk are interesting tools to us because they’re tailor-made for display advertisers who care about measurable performance, whether that be in the form of clicks, conversions, search lift, etc. That kind of data-driven ad strategy implies constant evolution in an advertiser’s display ad creative, which dovetails nicely with Canned Banners headache-free ad creation tools. O, what beautiful synergy!
Before we dive in, use the coupon code CannedBanners to double the length of their $1 trial period. The trial period is normally 7 days, but with the code you’ll get 14 days of access to WhatRunsWhere for $1.
Here are 3 things that WhatRunsWhere can help with:
1. Taking the guesswork out of placing your ads
Your competitors are smart and they’ve done their homework. With WhatRunsWhere, you can turn your competitors into your own personal media research team.
So instead of buying ad placements that are stabs in the dark, use WhatRunsWhere to find the placement locations that are already performing well for your competitors, and then use that intelligence as a factor in your overall media strategy.
Figure out the exact ad spots that perform well (the leaderboard at the top? the 300×250 on the right?), understand which specific sites or types of sites are better than others, learn about new sites you haven’t tried before, or figure out which ad networks are producing the best results.
2. Benchmarking your ad creative
Here’s another handy feature of WhatRunsWhere: they track and collect your competitors’ ads. When competitors’ ads are running a lot, you can assume they’re performing well. When competitors stop running other ads, it might be because those ads weren’t performing well. When competitors start running new ads, you’ll know. In short: you’ll be able to spot trends in your competitors’ ad creative which you can use to spot ways that your own ad creative can be made to perform better.
3. Finding the un-plucked fruit (or something less creepy-sounding)
Call it the “Law of Inverse Media Buying.” If WhatRunsWhere can track where your competitors are advertising, it can also track where your competitors are not advertising. This allows you to find un-exploited opportunities. You can find new sites that are similar to the ones your competitors advertise on. By testing a few of these new sites, you may be able to find new traffic sources that haven’t already been grabbed by your competitors.
If you want to put any of these ideas to the test (cheaply), WhatRunsWhere offers a 7-day trial for $1 has created a special coupon code CannedBanners to get 14 days access for just $1. Check them out at WhatRunsWhere.com.
Top Reason Users Don’t Click Banner Ads: They Don’t Want to Be Diverted From Their Current Online Activity
It’s a well-documented fact and challenge that average banner ad clickthrough rates are very low, somewhere around 0.09 percent (that’s just 9 clicks out of every 10,000 times an ad is shown).
A recent study sponsored by AdKeeper and 24/7 Real Media surveyed consumers and asked them why they don’t click on banner ads. The number one reason given: 61 percent don’t want to be distracted: “Online banner ads take me away from my current website, or from what I am doing.”
You could look at this research and conclude that people just hate all banner ads, therefore there’s no point in running banner campaigns. But such a conclusion would ignore a few key points:
1. If people don’t want to be distracted from their current web page, then put a lot of relevant content right in your banner ad. That way the viewer doesn’t have to click the ad in order to learn about your products/services. Canned Banners has all sorts of templates that allow you to include lots of product info. Here’s a good example of a template that can feature multiple products and descriptions.
2. A lot of banner ads look downright awful, which probably explains some poor performance. But this study doesn’t seem to have examined that aspect, aside from noting that “43 percent [of consumers] say online banner ads don’t seem interesting or engaging” (the concept “interesting and engaging” could have to do with multiple factors, including targeting, which is quite independent of how an ad looks). It seems to me that the study might have provided deeper insight into consumer behavior by passively observing people in test scenarios, rather than simply asking survey questions, which tend, by their very nature, to lead people to give certain answers. Such observations might reveal how the appearance of a banner ad (regardless of the product/service being advertised) affects its clickthrough rate. However, that probably would have been a much more expensive study to conduct.
3. Some banner ads get much higher clickthrough rates than 0.09%. Canned Banners’ own ad campaigns have done better than that. First, it’s important to target your ads intelligently. Understand who your customers are and then find them online by buying inventory on specific types of websites or targeting specific keywords. Don’t just run your banner ads everywhere, because then it’s almost certain that you’ll get low clickthrough rates. Second, utilize tactics like site retargeting, search retargeting, and geo-targeting. These tactics will help you pinpoint your customers; as long as you’re showing them well-designed, relevant banner ads, you’ll probably see clickthrough rates significantly higher than a measly 0.09%.