Are Internet Banner Ads Worth the Cost?

Marketing, both online and traditional, is only effective if the intended audience actually pays attention to your message.  It’s also important that your marketing be effective at persuading consumers to purchase from your dealership.  If your marketing efforts aren’t seen by consumers or don’t have an effect on them, you might as well be throwing that money away.

Internet banner advertising is ignored by 46% of the participants in a Harris Interactive study.  This means that almost half of web users that see your dealership’s Internet banner ads are blocking them out and not paying attention to your message.  That’s a pretty ineffective way to reach your customers.

Even more problematic was the finding that only 1% of participants believed Internet banner ads to be the most helpful advertising medium when making buying decisions.  Barely anyone turns to (or trusts) banner ads when looking for information related to purchasing.

Instead of throwing this part of your marketing budget away, it makes much mores sense to reallocate it to marketing techniques that actually earn your dealership sales.  Search engine optimization (SEO) for your car dealer website or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are considered more trustworthy and are less likely to be ignored than banner ads.  Take a deeper look at the effectiveness and ROI of all of your marketing campaigns, and only fund those that are earning your auto dealership real sales.

Tags: online marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Car Dealer Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.