The home page of any major website (AOL, Yahoo, eBay, MySpace, etc…) is a great place to do advertising and marketing research - as these are companies spending small fortunes trying to market their products or services. I recently came across Rozerem on the front page of Yahoo! Screen shots of the banners are below:

When displaying banner ads you only have a fraction of an actual second to attract a viewers eyes - otherwise Banner Blindness occurs and your banner is never seen. The above banners are very attractive, creative, but fail to get people to click. I don’t have the CTR numbers or the number of impressions Rozerem purchased on Yahoo (as this company is not a client of ours) - but I can determine from experience that the CTR is probably very very low, and Rozerem is not happy with the performance of their campaign. The very first image in a gif or flash banner should immediately get the users attention. In the example above you have to watch the banner ad for 6 seconds to find out what is being advertised. They did do a good job of including a call to action and that probably helps CTR - but it should be displayed in the beginning, not the end. If I were to have created the banners and the website for Rozerem we would have done the following:

• The banner would have included the words FREE, Sleeping Pills, Get a good nights sleep!, etc…
• The landing page would immediately gather visitor data by sending users to a lead gen form to receive free pills
• Instead of using boring images from old tv shows, we would have used images of attractive females in sexy silk lingerie sleeping peacefully and dreaming of a hunky boy toy

The current Rozerem website makes it too difficult for users to request a free trial of the sleeping pills. And once again, the banners are probably performing terribly and costing this pharmaceutical company an arm and a leg.

Tags: call to action, Landing Pages, online advertising, pharmaceutical advertising, prescription sleep aid, rozerem, sleeping pills

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
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