Advertising - How much is too much?

Advertising - How much is too much?

Emily Berry | 23/12/2009

I can understand website owners wanting a revenue stream from advertising on their websites, it’s relatively easy to setup and can be very cost effective to run – making it a lucrative activity by anyone’s standards.

There’s a multitude of possible ad slots and placements that you could use – although we beg you, please resist the temptation to fill every single one of them!

SMH have really taken it a bit too far in my humble opinion, just look at this screen grab:

We’ve got an MREC that expands out on mouse-over, which was a little hard to avoid while trying to get over to close the ANZ popup video on the right hand side. To top it all off we’ve got an NAB Leaderboard at the top of the page.

No wonder the poor girl in the breakout ad looks terrified – there’s ads crashing in on her from every possible direction.

It is also vitally important to seriously consider placement of ads when you have multiple appearing on one page – using the above screen as an example, do you think NAB would be happy about paying a premium for the Leaderboard position only to have an ANZ video ad placed immediately below theirs?

Certainly not.

While getting revenue from your website is important, you must consider both your advertisers and the people actually visiting your website – upset either with poorly planned (or excessive!) ad placement and you will eventually lose both.

tags: Online Marketing