For years, ad tracking services have identified and measured a common audience behavior — after a period of minutes, hours, or days since viewing an ad, a web user will choose to locate the web site associated with the ad. The arrival of such a user at an advertiser's site is commonly referred to as a "view-through."

Although view-through's represent a response to advertising that's overwhelmingly preferred by audience members (See Figure 1), view-through statistics indicate this behavior is being attenuated by other factors. Immediately, these questions come to mind:

If the audience prefers the view-through option by more than two-to-one over click-throughs, why are view-through statistics not consistently proportionate to that preference?

If conversions from view-throughs are greater than those from click-throughs (See Figure 2), why hasn't there been a serious effort by the advertising industry to encourage and enhance this valuable audience response?

The answer to the first question may be found in the ineffective navigational tools available to the audience. In fact, such tools often frustrate and mislead users in their searches for specific ads or advertisers. This is because the familiar back button, history list, and bookmarks found in all popular web browsers, are page oriented rather than content oriented. Thus, searching is typically limited to page titles, dates, or website addresses.

Frustrated by ineffective browser navigation, most users will opt for the utility of last resort — the generic search engine. Such a user may then confront hundreds of search-results for competing products or services and never reach the site associated with the originally viewed ad.

BannerBean is designed to address these navigational problems as well as provide means of encouraging and enhancing view-through behavior. BannerBean provides a quick, reliable way for site visitors to display and click previously-viewed advertisements. This permits BannerBean to control and direct view-through behavior instead of leaving the process to ineffective inavigational choices and systems.

From a user's perspective, a BannerBean-enabled ad offers a useful navigational tool without attachment to specific marketing campaigns or advertisers. In contrast to the perception that web ads are little more than distractions among content, BannerBean permits each ad to be regarded as an extension of a web browser's navigational features.

BannerBean's market includes site publishers who wish to increase ad revenue by capturing the view-through clicks provided by BannerBean. It is also likely that advertisers and ad services will encourage, or even require, publishers to deploy BannerBean to assure the widest possible exposure for their ads.

 

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