Though the headline above cleverly omits the 6, the linked to article is "6 ways to improve click-through-rate on your banner ads without being spammy", sure sign of link-bait and mostly vacuous content. In fact only 2 out of the 6 (#1 & #5) are ways that could help.
I'm not sure if it is counter-intuitive. With text you can describe exactly what it is you are selling and thus provide a reason for clicking the banner.
Stuff that is mainly graphics is easy to just mentally filter out with the rest of the website chrome.
To take it a step further, we are so used to obnoxious banner ads on the internet that I think most people automatically ignore them.
Just a guess, but the less "bannery" the ad is, probably the better chance it has of being noticed. Ironic, since banners got so obnoxious in the first place as an attention-grabbing mechanism.
Personally, as a casual browser, there are so many ads with "calls to action" that informative targetted ads like the Pusher one could actually pull me in. I want to read it because it has no bright-coloured button in the bottom left corner.
Not sure what you mean...the first paragraph reads "Lots of marketers combat this by creating banners that stand out in a “spammy-esque” way to achieve a high click-through-rate, but how do you do this without being spammy?" With this sentence, I had intended this to beg the question how can marketers get a higher click-through-rate without being spammy, but I apologize if that isn't clear.
next