Do People Click On Banner Ads?

Digital display ads for recruiting talent

A recruitment industry friend of mine recently asked me: “Do people click on banner ads?” My answer was two fold – A) Yes, B) Is that the best question to ask?

As you know, banners – officially digital display ads - are omnipresent on the web and within many apps. You see them all the time, likely hundreds per day. As one of the most common advertising tools used, display ads prove to be incredibly flexible and effective as they can reach people wherever they spend time online and on their device of choice.
 

Further, the ability to design who sees them through audience targeting technology, is allowing employers to reach audiences most likely to be interested in, and responsive to, their message/career opportunities.

Back to my friend who asked the question of do people click on them. Yes, they do but that’s not where the story ends. The more encompassing question is: “What is the full impact of digital display advertising?”

The number of times a display ad is clicked on is certainly one important way to measure the impact and success of digital display. The number of clicks can tell you how well suited the audience was for your message, how compelling your “offer” (employee value proposition) was, how engaging the creative was, how strong your brand is. For sure, clicks are great – you want interested talent taking direct action on your message. However, there’s something else significant to consider - View Thrus.

Various sources, including Harvard Business School and com Score, tell us that display (banner) ads influence search. That is, someone sees a display ad on the web, doesn’t click it, but then visits the advertiser’s site another way – typically a search on Google or other search engine. There are tools you can use to report on exactly how many View Thrus your campaign drives - people who visited your website after seeing your display ad. This number is often markedly higher than the clicks.



For example, an audience-targeted, digital display campaign we recently ran for a large nonprofit to fill a variety of roles delivered 367 clicks from 455,636 impressions delivered.

The click thru rate (CTR) was .08%, about average. However, because they have a tracking tag on their career site to measure this, we also tracked 1,495 view thrus – 4x the number of clicks! So, counting both direct clicks and view thrus, the campaign drove 1,862 interested clicks (candidates). Direct clicks plus view thurs is a much more complete way to measure the full impact of a digital display advertising campaign.

So back to the initial question, yes, people click on banners ads but they also “view thru.” It’s the combination of this direct and indirect traffic that will give you a more complete picture of the effect of your digital display campaigns in driving interested candidates to your career site and job postings.

This article first appeared here.