Can banners really increase conversion rates?
Erwin Schuren, June 20 2011, 21 reactions
Nowadays, banners have become very popular website components. They are mostly used to attract the attention of website visitors. Still, there is only a small group of people clicking on banners, although these have been put on page positions with high visit rates.
The problem with standard banners is that the people spotting them do not necessarily belong to the banner target group. If a website user spots a banner that is meaningless to him, he will certainly not click on it. Wouldn’t it just be great if you could truly match banners with the right interest profiles?
There are several options to do this. So far, retargeting has been the most widely used method. This technique shows relevant banners based on products and/or pages that have been previously visited. Although retargeting already doubles the click through ratio, it remains related to the specific pages once visited by a user.
Once it has become clear to which specific target group a user belongs, this information could be used to show relevant banners. This specific target group can already provide a more extensive picture of a user than if you only derive information from the pages most viewed by this user. With an improved insight, banners can be presented that are even more relevant to the user.
However, creating target groups can provide good representations, but still the individual user may only just squeeze into the group profile. By understanding exactly what is being presented on a page, IQNOMY can also create individual user profiles. This is a very specific profile and can make an even more specific match between users and banners. Each user is unique, as everybody consumes a different combination of content, how small the difference may be. These tiny details can make an individual page visitor feel understood, which results in an increased conversion rate.
It is even possible to leave it all up to IQNOMY’s Liquid Internet solution, to test which users may like to view which specific banners. One of the outcomes could be that a banner targeted at target group A appears to be three times more popular at target group B, which wasn’t considered in the first place. By monitoring each user’s banner click conversion rates, it becomes clear which one should be shown to generate the highest possible conversion. This technique can be seen as an A/B test which keeps improving itself continuously rather than only once - when the test is terminated.
IQNOMY supports all scenarios as mentioned before to provide (B2C) organizations with any possible way to show content to the end user with the aim to totally optimize conversion.
