Window shopping

When I advise clients on how to optimize their banner ads, I sometimes talk about moving desirable actions upstream. What I mean is that instead of making people click from a banner to a site and then getting them to do something on the site, why not just put the action on the banner? You end up saving some steps in between where many people might just drop off.

What if a client (not mine) took this to the extreme? You might get something like this Radio Shack ad. The thing is a whole shopping site within a banner. It has some pretty amazing functionality built-in. You can browse categories, then products in those categories. Add products to a shopping list, then save the list or go take the list with you to the site. Within the banner you can also locate a store or sign up for email communications. Aside from checking out, you don't need to leave the banner.

The banner where I found it:


Shopping list in the banner


Store locator


Categories to browse


I'm not sure if I could advise a client to go to this extreme. It just seems to me that it'd be extremely challenging to take someone from their mindset of reading an article to a shopping mindset of buying electronics. Sure, you want to show your breadth of offerings but having a full catalog in the banner seems like overkill. Now if this was targeted to when I was reading reviews of electronics, that would be different.