Slashdot Mirror
An Experiment in Micro-Advertising
danny writes: "Much has been said about the death of the banner-ad, but I was
curious about whether text-only ads on a
smaller scale worked. So I carried out
an experiment in micro-advertising." This is the complete opposite approach of most advertising. Does it work? Well....
Computer feeling sluggish? Time for a replacement? We've got what you need. Click here to enter our online store!
or...
Computer feeling sluggish? Time for a replacement? Visit the Dell Online Store at dell.com to order online!
Notice that the former doesn't mention the company who's advertising, and if the user doesn't click the link (and remember that statistically most users don't), you get no brand exposure at all.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Pretty slick, in my opinion.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
According to this Nielsen//NetRatings press release (PDF), the top 100 Web advertisers in "traditional" industries have a CPM of $20.10 and a click-through rate of 0.22%.
So if I worked for Google's advertising department, I'd be damn proud of Yee's figures.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Brento is correct, this experiment is essentially uninformative. Danny Yee basically posts his text ads, and when they prove ineffective he draws the conclusion that text ads in general are not as good as other types of internet advertisement. There is simply not enough information to determine whether this type of advertisement is good or not.
:)
I personally think they'll prove "just as" effective as normal graphic ads. People will be more appreciative of the lack of cheesy graphics and such, but not enough to actually click on them.
They see a low number of click-throughs, and a low number of purchaces on click-throughs. So they can see the low response to their adds. They are more willing to spend their money on tv adds where they cant as readily see they are wasting money.
The industry has been fighting this for years. You'll notice that a lot of TV or radio ads say, "Ask for Extension 760". There's no real extension 760, or whatever extension they use, but it's a code that corresponds to where they placed the ad. Of course, most of us don't bother with asking for extensions when we're ordering things.
Print ads have been doing this with their web site tie-ins for a while, too. I just picked up the latest issue of Time off my desk for an example, and Covad's ad says to visit covad.com/sdsl29. That's a tie-in to the magazine ad, and it's a lot like a click-through.
What's your damage, Heather?
The higher questions are, what kind of site *should* host ads, how can advertising be incorporated into the content in such a way as to be visable, interesting, and attractive to users of the site.
Well, I can answer the first one pretty easily. If you're getting free services, you should expect to get hit with obnoxious ads. The more you pay, the less obnoxious the ads are.
For example, take radio stations. If you turn on your radio and listen to the free stations, your content will be interrupted every 10 minutes with a stream of advertisements that make banner ads look positively unobtrusive. You get a decent amount of content, but you have to sit through a lot of ads.
Next up, public radio. If you shell out money directly to the station to support it, there's a lot less commercials. Granted, not everyone shells out the money, so in exchange, guess what? You get a minor amount of commercials. They're much less annoying than regular radio, but they're there.
Finally, if you pony up a whopping $30+ a month for digital radio through your cable provider, you can listen to streaming music without any interruptions at all.
That's how media works. The more you pay, the less someone else has to pay. But sooner or later, somebody has to pay. You can point to things like Shoutcast and whine that you can indeed get free audio, but somebody's paying for that through their bandwidth costs, and so are you. You don't see anybody running Shoutcast stations on free ISP's.
What amazes me is that people are surprised by banner ads. They honestly expect someone to put up a server somewhere and offer services for free. You don't see anybody putting up free radio stations, do you? Sure, Joe Bob might pirate some radio for a while, but when he gets bored, he goes back to work like the rest of us.
What's your damage, Heather?
The text-only ad said:
563 lively book reviews on all subjects
Whereas the Google ad said:
A passionate but scholarly study of modern slavery
Anyone with half a brain is going to read book reviews before they read a "scholarly study". This isn't a controlled study, and the results are useless.
Suggestion to Danny: the next time you do a study, the test has to be set up so that it's not biased. The ads should have exactly the same content, so that you can judge the ad delivery and not the ads themselves. If you were trying to find out who found book reviews interesting as opposed to studies, then you ran a successful study, but otherwise this is totally useless.
What's your damage, Heather?
Actually, I did a Google AdWords. But in a trollingly juvenile kind of way. You'll either like my story, or you'll hate it.
:) (Probably NOT.)
I submitted a story about Google's adwords, and how it was very interesting in that *anybody* can place an advertisement, automatically, for anything they wanted. I personally consider this a revolution in the way advertising is handled, and I wish the idea would spread.
Of course, my story was rejected. So, what does any evil Slashdotter do? That's right. I did a Google AdWords banner. It was titled "Get the Slashdot Guide!" with the body something to the effect of "Learn the secrets and make the most out of Slashdot. Ride the Taco!" It was set on the keyword "slashdot". It displayed the URL "www.slashdotguide.com".
Effectiveness rate? VERY. I was getting about 12% click-throughs each day. I set a tiny budget of $30. It lasted for a few days. I would say that AdWords can be *very successful* if you correctly target your advertisement. Your experiment was rather bland, IMHO.
Oh. The catch? The ad, while claiming it was directing you to "www.slashdotguide.com" and displaying the URL on a MOUSEOVER, actually linked them to the GoatSe.cx picture. I'm rather surprised that Google didn't put a stop to it. I'm rather surprised I did it.
But it did get my point across when I re-submitted the story about Google AdWords. Even if they didn't follow through on it then and there. Maybe this story has something to do with it?
And those of us with complete brains will read the scholarly studies.
Seriously, folks, something has to be detailed enough for me to know whether or not I'll be interested in it before I go check it out. "563 lively book reviews on all subjects" is way too general to pique my interest, not to mention the fact that 563 is way too few to cover "all subjects". But I would certainly be interested in finding out what kind of horrific working conditions exist in other parts of the world, and where this stuff is going on.
Banner ads work like impulse shopping. If I go to the supermarket for a quart of milk, and on the way to the dairy department I see a plain opaque box with the word "SNACK" written on it, the chances that I'll throw it in the cart are nil. But if I spot the brand-new taco-flavored Fritos, I might give them a try, because I already have enough information (I know what a taco is, and I've eaten Fritos before) to become interested in it.
-Chris
I'd disagree with your conclusion. The most effective TV commercials might be entertaining ones, but remember that most people's goal when watching television is to be entertained. Web sites vary, but most of the ones I see emphasize information more than they emphasize entertainment. If I'm reading the web looking for stuff to read, even if it's fun reading material, I'm more likely to click through ads that seem to match my current goal than I am to click on ads that are funny.
The best advertisements are the ones that make the viewer think "look at that! yes, this is what I want". Exactly what will make a viewer think this depends on how well you match your ad to the viewers frame of mind.
By the way....
You've hit the nail squarely on the side. :-)
Most of advertising in any media is designed for one thing: Brand name recognition and Pavlovian conditioning. (OK, that's two things)
In the big North American cities, there are pages of classified ads that have nothing but companies' names. That's an attempt at fostering name recognition (probably a pretty lousy one, but dirt cheap). TV ads are usually funny or sexy skits with heavy product placement. Does that tell you _anything_ about the product? No, but it equates fun or sex with the product in some basal part of your brain, and when you go shopping for whatever it is, that association might tweak you into buying their product over the competition's.
Of course, TV and radio ads like this don't work as soon as you start thinking about what you want to buy. Guess what? People don't think about what they want to buy! Ads like this are enormously successful, no matter how little they say about the product.
The problem with web ads was one of perception. The web is all about linking and clicking, and for some reason the advertisers thought that they could measure interest in their ads (and thus efficacy) by counting clicks. Lo and behold, nobody clicks on the damned ads! At first it looked like web advertising was a bust, but in fact, they're now learning that people don't like traditional media ads any better than web ads, and wouldn't watch them voluntarily either. Now they're discovering the final result: Web banners work, and work in exactly the same way as traditional ads. Name recognition and mood association are just as annoying and effective no matter what the medium; and conversely, 'customer participation' (i.e. clicking through) is equally unlikely and irrelevant no matter what the medium.
So get used to the ads, because they're not going anywhere.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There was an excellent article at Suck.com last month, pointing out one simple fact:
Banner ads probably do workThe problem has been [to loosely paraphrase] that the companies selling and managing banner ads thought that advertising on the Internet would be different from advertising in other media.
Unfortunately, they're wrong. The clickthrough rates are low, sure. But how often does an ad for, say, jeans, make you head out and buy them [the rough equivalent of a 'click-through']?
Ads are designed to get you to remember the product when you're heading out to buy products, thereby establishing brand recognition and making you more likely to choose that manufacturer's product over the hundred or so nearly identical competing brands'.
Just because it's a new medium doesn't mean we've changed that much, and as the article points out, with the cultural recognition of that damned monkey, it could probably sell us just about anything.
Larsal
Banner ads aren't totally dead. T.V. commercials have found people don't want the mundain information, they want to be entertained. Banner ads just need to be reformatted and reborn.
All your bases are belong to us!
Surprisingly, no one has mentioned the most obviously distressing point of the article: the sites designed with the most consistency (the most usable content) were the worst for advertising.
Doesn't this just underscore what everyone already knows, that annoying advertising gets results because people pay attention to it? Imagine a world where television programmers religiously ran their advertising between shows, leaving the content of the shows uninterrupted. Would you ever see ads in such a world? Wonderfully usable sites such as Google, although conforming to Jakob Nielsen's design ideas, don't create enough ruckus around their ads to create a reliable advertising medium. Television, on the other hand, has awful ads all through its content, with varying ad lengths and spot times to keep the user in his/her seat, expecting the content to return at any minute.
The funny paradox here is that TV continues to attract viewers, even with such practices, while sites that attempt to conform to a more television-like advertising standard merely run off their users. Personally, I believe that this is primarily due to a comparatively higher level of sophistication on the part of web users (say all you want...at least we can turn on the computer, right?); if the web is ever saturated with the masses that TV attracts, then the ad model could well change to the more annoying TV-style (Sign of the apocalypse, btw...), where sites that are inconsistent, confusing, or otherwise forcing the user to see the ads can create a revenue stream based on the ad.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Does advertising work? It depends on what you want it to achieve.
I don't see anyone challenging the viability of print, television, or radio ads. But I can't remember a single time when I saw something advertised, dropped everything I was doing, and ran out immediately and bought that item.
So why is it that you expect that I'm going to buy something just because I see a link to it from some webpage I'm visiting?
I also don't buy products in order to reward them for sponsoring a content provider I happen to like. Advertisers think they subsidize popular entertainment, which
If I buy something, I buy it because I need it or because I want it and also because I know it exists. Advertising can't tell me if I need something. Most advertising does a lousy job in telling me why I should want something. Aside from infomercials, most advertising these days doesn't try to tell me why I should want something at all. But one thing that advertising does a pretty good job of is letting me know that some product exists.
Advertisers should also know that the world was saturated with advertising and people clamoring for my money long before the internet ever came into existance, and simply providing more room for advertising via the invention of cyberspace won't give me any more dollars in my wallet to spend on stuff. I'm already spending at the highest rate that I can sustain with my income. You've got to learn that there's a such thing as diminishing returns.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
For a more in-depth analysis (and a better test program) I recommend reading Jakob Nielsen's columns on web usability, starting with one specifically about web-based advertising.
Here's the URLs:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9709a.html
I have read that the very first commercial jingle (for gum, as I recall) was carefully timed to some 10 seconds -- long enough to be memorably irritating, but not quite long enough to get up and turn the radio dial.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Here's a sample of what your average 'blog will look like by the end of the Summer:
I can't imagine sites pimping misleading links. But it could happen.
The problem with the experiment is that the ads contained different text, and the author even identifies this in his analysis.
His Google ad was very specifically oriented towards one book review; his RobotWisdom ad geared toward numerous reviews. THe expectations of users seeing the link then passing through the link would be radically different, and not surprisingly give his RobotWisdom ad the edge.
If they had both been geared toward the site overall, I'd believe that the results were valid. Instead, I have to question what factor really resulted in the difference in clickthroughs. This has made me want to run my own experiment with my own site, but being more careful about the wording of the two ads.
Beware typoes.
The biggest problem with click-through ads is that they are countable. This is why the advertising industry is pulling their advertising. They see a low number of click-throughs, and a low number of purchaces on click-throughs. So they can see the low response to their adds. They are more willing to spend their money on tv adds where they cant as readily see they are wasting money.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.