Our latest summary of ad clickthrough rates statistics in the US, Europe, and Worldwide is designed to help you benchmark your paid digital and social media ads, set marketing budgets, and define your goals

If you're forecasting your digital media spend, you need to compare the ROI of your display ads, paid social, Google Ads, and social media. Depending on your objectives, it's worth reviewing and benchmarking the latest metrics like average click-through rates, average cost per click, and cost per lead. I've put this compilation together to help marketing professionals create direct response conversion models for digital marketing campaigns. By creating budget models using known benchmarks for average CTRs and digital media click-through costs, you can better forecast your return on investment from digital media ads. Our budgeting and forecasting spreadsheets include: Simple digital channel planning spreadsheet Conversion and revenue model spreadsheet Month-by-month customer acquisition spreadsheet …

How you can stand out in a world dominated by Facebook and Google

Just because you believe something to be true doesn’t make it so. It’s one of my favorite adages, and it has some correlation to what’s going on with our friends over at Facebook and Google regarding digital advertising. I fervently believe this duopoly, as it’s now called, will be impenetrable by other paid media platforms.

But is this true?

These two powerhouses, according to some reports, account for nearly 85 percent of all digital media spend. All other platforms are collectively scrambling for the table scraps. Take Twitter, for example. As far as mobile goes, it controls just 2 percent of the total ad spend — down from 2.6 percent in 2016. The good news is that brand marketers can find efficiencies by focusing on just two platforms with…

Auto-play video and banner ads are seen to be least effective digital formats by global CMOs

What digital ad formats should you use to get the best ROI online? One way to answer the question is to flip it on its head, and ask, what are the least effective formats? According to a survey of global CMOs, the worst ad formats are auto-play videos and standard banners. Standard banners are hardly surprising, as ad blockers and 'banner blindness' have taken their toll of the years. It's gotten so bad that on many sites the majority of banner ad clicks are actually accidental. It's interesting that no CMOs thought that sponsored content was an ineffective technique, and very few thought pre-roll ads were ineffective. This shows that it isn't video ads that are ineffective, just video ads starting when the user hasn't opted in to watch anything. …

A new report by renowned digital marketing analyst Rebecca Lieb points to the decline of banner ads and the opportunity it represents for content marketers.

Advertising effectiveness is declining. Savvy web users are installing ad-blockers in droves with Adblock use in Europe over 30% in some countries, whilst everyone is developing 'banner blindness' with their own internal ad-blockers, which is also known by its more common name, the human brain. The move to mobile makes it harder to deliver effective ads without being obtrusive and increasing concerns about data privacy mean some consumers are in no mood to hand over their details. This might sound like bad news for digital marketers, but it actually opens up a whole world of opportunities for doing things differently and reaching customers more effectively. For content marketers specifically, it means budgets will continue to tilt in their favor, and greater demands will be put on content marketing departments, as…

We talked to Lee Evans about how he sees ad-blocking affecting digital marketers

It's hardly surprising that digital marketers are no fans of ad-blockers. For many online publishers who make their revenue that way, it can feel like people are basically making off with their content without contributing to their revenue. As you'll know Ad blocking is on the rise as these latest stats on the popularity of ad blockers show. It's an imporant issues since in some countries, in younger age groups over one third of audiences used ad blockers. For digital marketers who work it other areas like ecommerce or marketing a SaaS product, the problem is more around missing out on large segments of their potential audience when they run ad campaigns online. But marketers need not despair, there are ways to circumvent ad-blockers,…