How many times have you come across news sites cluttered with banner ads, all competing for attention along with the usual array of headlines and other layout elements?

Probably you would find such ‘ad-overdone’ pages on small sites. A post from Comscore, the media metrics company, the other day explained why it was bad from a business point of view - even if you were to ignore the design part.

"The conventional wisdom for publishers was simply that more ads equaled more dollars. Over time, the industry has learned that very often more ads per page equaled significantly less impact. Good advertising is about telling a story and by cluttering a web page with several competing messages, there is simply no way to effectively engage with the average consumer, " said the post, Four Ways to Improve Display Advertising.

So that’s it: no reason really to cram those front pages with so many display ads.

That apart, the post also touches on other things that could help advertisers exploit the potential of their ads better. One is that ads were of poor creative quality because of historical reasons: "With more condensed space and a lack of site, sound and motion, online ads have traditionally aimed to cram a lot of information into a few square inches of real estate." But now, things seem to be changing.

The other issues were poor targeting and wrong metrics being used for measuring campaign success: "Clicks are easy to measure, which of course makes it tempting to use them for evaluation of a campaign, even if clicks bear little relationship to the actual impact of the campaign on consumers. "