Using online for response? Stop. Before you create another banner, fix your website first.
Channel selection? Banners sets? CTR? When using the Web as a response channel, these are the LEAST important part of the equation.
Short of featuring some seriously gratuitous nudity, your banners are not going to have click rates much better than 0.5%.
What happens when a consumer arrives at the site – the actual sales funnel – that is where the magic happens.
Or in most cases, does not.
Having started as well as worked for dozens of companies whose entire biz model relies on converting banner impressions in to customers – my experience:
No one pays attention to what happens after the click.
Marketers whose promotions and bonuses rely on quarterly sales figures let 468×60 do all the heavy lifting. But there is not a Direct Response practitioner on earth that would leave their success up to IAB standards alone.
And yet, marketing departments can stare dismal conversion in the face for years and never consider touching the site. Focus is always external: better targeting, optimized creative, sexier offers - all of it generating traffic to lazily conceived, one-size-fits-all Web sites and sales funnels. Bounce!
(Given ‘performance’ basically means ‘clicks’, a perverse logic has evolved where the only goal of online campaigns is to generate clicks. No other KPI just the ‘c’ word. See also: Likes)
The future of online advertising, the sales part of it anyway, belongs to on-boarding.
Hat tip to the The Beancast where Mr. Bob Knorpp has been bringing this subject up more often.
Good read about better on-boarding UX: Onboarding: Designing Welcoming First Experiences