One of the questions our clients always ask us is what is the best means of advertising on the Internet? Do I get more click-throughs from search engines or from banner ads?

My response is always which are you more interested in - traffic or qualified leads? With free advertising, you may get some traffic. With targeted advertising, you get qualified leads. Which do you prefer?

I believe that targeted banner advertising click-throughs yield more qualified prospects than high search engine placement click throughs. Here's why.

For every click-through one of our clients gets, if that click-through came from our targeted banner advertising, there is a better chance this click-through will turn into a qualified lead once this Internet user gets to one of our client's sites.

How do I know this? Whenever we increase our banner advertising investments, all of which send users directly to our clients' web sites, we get a corresponding increase in success stories via email and phone from happy clients. There is no such correlation between our clients high placement in search engines. Clients like this, they feel good about being on top, and placing high in search engines definitely increases traffic to their web sites - but we do not generally see a corresponding increase in qualified leads.

For example, there's been lots of churn happening over the last few months in the search engines. Excite has completely changed some things. Lycos hasn't really been indexing sites for months. We've seen a corresponding drop in how well our clients place in search engines, and our log analysis verifies this. But over this same period of time, we have significantly increased our advertising positions, more than doubling our presence in Excite, taking an anchor position in Virtual Relocation, etc.

The upshot is that during this time period our clients are generally reporting that they are receiving more qualified leads, not less, even though their actual traffic is down. This can only be attributable to our increase in the targeted banner advertising that we do for them.

This is significant and it has lots of potential implications.

Why is this? Why would targeted advertising yield more qualified prospects than high placement in search engines?

I believe it is because Internet users aren't dumb. They know, when they do a search, that much or most of the results are irrelevant, and that coming up on top in a search engine does not mean that this is the best site out there. They know anybody can and will come up in their searches, without any regard for quality or credibility. As a matter of fact, because of all the trickery to get to the top in search engines, there is probably somewhat of a feeling out there, on the part of the user, of suspicion. You know what I mean. You click on some site that comes up well in a search engine, and you're never sure what you are going to get.

Targeted advertising, on the other hand, tells people in advance what they are going to get. And we as a culture are conditioned to respond to advertising. The top companies or products in any category are always the biggest advertisers, almost without exception. Everybody implicitly knows it doesn't necessarily cost a dime to come up well in a search engine query.

Like it or not, advertising has inherently more credibility than search engine results. My conclusion is that, even though you should always try, focusing on placing high in search engines is for amateurs lacking resources, and traditional, proven forms of marketing, like advertising, are for professionals.

And Internet users know this.

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