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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....
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
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?
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
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
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 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.