Every Internet ad is designed to elicit some combination of these three audience responses:

A clear understanding of the ad's message.

A spontaneous click-through to an advertiser's website.

A subsequent decision to seek the advertiser's website (e.g. a "view-through".)

Although the on-line advertising industry is heavily invested in research, metrics, advanced media, and deployment tools that exploit the first two responses, it generally regards the third response as little more than an interesting parameter for measurement. BannerBean, however, is specifically designed to enable, encourage, and manage such view-through responses.

For Internet users attempting to navigate their way to a complete view-through without BannerBean, there are few alternatives.

Users seeking ads viewed during brief browsing sessions might simply use their browsers' back-buttons. However, users needing to search through periods of several hours, or even days, will find their web browsers poorly suited to the task. This is because the navigational tools found in all popular web browsers provide no means for users to specify previously browsed pages based on page content. Browsers only offer lists of page titles, organized alphabetically, or by time of initial retrieval, or by occurrence of a user-supplied search term within those page titles. Simply put, all popular web browsers offer “page-oriented” rather than “content-oriented” navigation.

To find a banner ad viewed within a range of hours or days, a user might try scrolling through a browser's history list. With luck, one title in that lengthy list might indicate the web page containing the user's desired banner ad. Unfortunately, a web page's title rarely relates to advertisements within its page.

That user might also trust his or her memory enough to try directly accessing the presumed page using a bookmark or by typing the page's address into the address bar of his or her browser. However, the likelihood that a casually browsed page will be bookmarked, or its address remembered a day later, is generally minimal.

That user might even attempt to deduce the address of the banner ad's advertiser from his or her recollection of the ad's content. In this case, the user must rely entirely on his or her memory, ingenuity, and luck, rather than suitable navigational tools.

Whenever a user fails to access a desired banner ad, the result is not only an unhappy Internet user who has lost time and productivity; the banner's advertiser is deprived of a potential customer and a website's publisher is deprived of revenue from an additional impression and click-through. Furthermore, an Internet user who commits to navigating back to a specific banner ad is generally considered of higher value to an advertiser than a user who casually selects an ad when it is first viewed.

In addition to these problems, rotating banner ads bring additional headaches to users seeking desired ads (See sidebar).

With Bannerbean, all of the above problems dissappear. As BannerBean placement increases in popular web sites, users wishing to return to previously viewed ads simply click any BannerBean in those sites to locate their desired ads. Such audience members are immediately presented with their selected ads and routed to the associated advertisers by clicking the ads as they normally would.

 

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