Should television ads, direct mail, and digital display ads be in your healthcare marketing budget? Marketing Your Hospital explored where hospital marketers should spend their marketing dollars in 2020. We’re sharing what we found in this three-part series. In this third installment, we take a closer look at the latest trends in digital advertising. And be sure to check out Part 1: Is TV advertising dead? and Part 2: Should You Invest in Direct Mail?
effectiveness of banner ads
Hospital Marketing: Banner Ad Best Practices
Research helps identify how to make banner ads more effective.
Dynamic Logic measured ad effectiveness for 4800 web banner campaigns and found that size is not an important factor in whether a banner ad was effective. In Abbey Klaassen’s article in Ad Age, she offers a few tips from Dynamite Logic’s research for making online banner ads more effective.
1. Simple flash is overused. Better choices are rich media with video. For every branding goal Dynamic Logic studied, simple Flash performed the weakest.
2. Try to avoid ads that border content. Those are the banner ads that are most easily ignored.
3. Publishers should consider mixing up ad placement from page to page. By placing the same ad formats in the same place on every page, consumers become trained to avoid the ads.
4. Not all attention is positive. Avoid flashing, blinking or annoying ads
5. Ads that cover content and don’t have a “skip” or “close” button are by far, the most annoying formats.
These tips are helpful in trying to maximize a hospital’s effectiveness using web banner ads. The internet is where people are. Hospital marketers should be there too. But they must pay special attention to the research to learn best practices.
Hospital Marketing: Online Display Ads Improve Search Performance
Recent studies indicate that online banner ads dramatically improve search results for both paid and organic search. 
Significant money is now being spent on internet display advertising. Many have questioned the effectiveness of such expenditures. However some recent studies have shown that online display ads are very effective and in ways that were unexpected.
A recent study by the Atlas Institute, “Where Can You Find Your Customer: The Intersection of Search and Display” indicate that internet visitors who are exposed to both search and display advertising convert at a 22% percent higher rate than by search alone.
Similar results were revealed in a study by Comscore, “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online”. Comscore found that internet visitors exposed to display ads spend surprisingly 55% more time on the site and viewed 51% more pages than those not exposed to online display ads.
Yes organic search is still better than display ads for search but when display ads are combined with organic search the results are significantly better than with either one alone. This means to maximize a brand’s effectiveness on the web, both search optimization for organic search and online display ads are essential?
Just like in traditional media, multiple exposures over different media or venues increase effectiveness. The same is true for the web. A combined, integrated, coordinated marketing approach will yield the maximum results.