The truth about online ads is that precious few people actually click on them.
And the percentage of people who respond to common "banner ads" is shrinking steadily. Click-through rates have been declining for years. The novelty of Web ads that helped fuel higher responses in the beginning has worn off as online marketing hit the mainstream.
The so-called click-through rate for those ads on major Web destinations such as Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL declined from 0.75% to 0.27% during 2006, according to Eyeblaster, a New York-based online ad serving and monitoring firm. It says that last March the average click rate on standard banner ads across the whole Web was 0.2%. This reflects a surge in new ads and Web pages.
To some extent, declining click rates reflect how Web users are getting numb to the least sophisticated Web come-ons. That's bad news for advertisers.
Source: BusinessWeek, November 12, 2007