Social Media is a better investment than banner advertising.

Download the banners ads and Social Media whitepaper.

Traffic and impressions are the two most common red herrings that lead marketing departments to continue to spend budgets on banner and display advertising while allocating little or nothing to Social Media, despite hard evidence in the latter's favour.

In a live benchmarking study, directly comparing the performance of a banner ad campaign and a Social Media campaign, we found that banner ads did drive significantly more traffic. No surprises there.

But we also found the following:

Banner ads

2-3%: percentage of all banner ad traffic actually engaged with the target brand
3 seconds: the average time users remained on target site from a banner click
£££s: cost per single engagement during four week campaign was 23 times HIGHER than that of equivalent Social Media campaign

Social Media

60-90%: percentage of all Social Media traffic engaged with target brand
£££s: cost per single engagement during four week campaign was 23 times LOWER than that of equivalent banner advertisement.

So the question is: which campaign's traffic was more valuable and which budget was better spent?

Download the banners ads and Social Media whitepaper.

See also the following blog posts:

Do we need people now we have buzz monitoring tools?

Banner blindness turns businesses to Social Media.