There’s a big problem with banner ads right now, when it comes to trying to get leads.
The problem? Accidental clicks. But especially on mobile devices.
I don’t have evidence, but my very educated guess is that a majority of clicks on banner ads with mobile devices is accidental.
And that’s the number one reason right now that if you use banner ads to try and get sales leads, you’re not getting them. The clicks you’re paying for are not legit.
When I use banner ads, it’s only for branding purposes. I pay CPM (cost per 1,000 views), so when the accidental clicks happen, it doesn’t hurt the campaign.
I’d bet the only businesses that pay per click with banner ads are either giant companies looking to get as many clicks as possible and have giant budgets so they don’t care if there’s some junk mixed with their ad spend. Or businesses that don’t know what they’re doing (either people that think banner ads get leads or people that don’t know how to opt out of the banner ad network).
Why does this keep happening? Because publishers (websites that sell ads), in a lot of cases get paid by the click and they want the accidental clicks to happen because they make more money. A lot of publishers purposefully try and place the ads on their websites in a way where a lot of people will accidentally click them.
The search engines, namely Google (cause Bing and Yahoo copy what Google does), needs to crack down on this because banner ads should be more effective than they are.
Banner ads will never reach their full potential until the publishers are unable to do this.