On June 29th Business Insider had a piece called “It’s More Likely You Will Survive A Plane Crash Or Win The Lottery Than Click A Banner Ad”. I tweeted this July 11.

The conclusion is (presented in a pretty populistic way) that the chance that you actually will click on a banner ad is virtually none existing…

Then I got a response from Chris Bourke: “agree Eric but what about the display effect? Especially large format ads – create familiarity irrespective of click?”

This is a good point. Even if you don’t click the ads you are still exposed to them and might remember them anyway. Maybe you get inspired and walk into a physical store instead. Read the blog post from Danny at Kiss metric, called “How To Use Google AdWords To Reach The People Who Didn’t Click On Your Ad”.

I was one of the speakers at a ROMI conference here in Oslo some time back. One of the other speakers came from one of the big media houses in Norway and they had actually measured the probability that you will remember an online ad.

The result was discouraging. People could only recall about 30-35% of the online ads they where exposed to. His conclusion was that:

1) People didn’t remember because there were so many ads on the page – which it is on a normal newspaper page. 

2) The creative solutions were more focused on creating cool and flashing ads, than presenting the message. As an example in many of the ads the message and the logo (company) was presented in the end (sometime after 3-4 seconds, and by then the user would have scrolled past the ad.
So the conclusion is that they don’t click and the don’t remember…
And by the way… I have twins..