The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
andrewchen.co
andrewchen.co
I had to sign up for a college related thing on a website once and I just could not see that sign up button. They made it a flashing advertisement sized block right above another article, with big letters "SIGN UP HERE". A friend sent me the link and I literally spent 5 minutes trying to find it in navigation bars and other links in the article. My friend had to send me a screenshot of his screen with a big red arrow pointing to the sign up block before I noticed it. I now use Adblock but for the times that it doesn't work, my mental Adblock seems to always help me out as well ( Especially for those sneaky ads mixed in between real articles ).
The usual argument pro drip-emails is: Emails will sit right there in your inbox, next to important other stuff. Now, since everybody does it, it sits right next to a thousand other newsletters. Just like with RSS readers a couple years ago.
No doubt the next iteration is to change the functionality so that the 'x' does something other than close the window, but we'll all learn to avoid that too
I feel dirty having to look at the ad for the 3 seconds it takes me to figure this out.
I'm not seeing so many lightboxes these days. This is a blessed thing indeed.
Well, duh, people tend to avoid unrewarding experiences. And advertisement is basically the pursuit of pushing unrewarding experiences onto people. Of course once they are onto you they won't fall for the tricks again. People have just become much, much better at filtering now (both mentally and digitally).
Just think stadium sideline advertising.
We all have our heads filled with company/product logos, slogans, jingles, etc. all this useless junk that just keeps piling on and on throughout our life, insidiously altering our behavior.
Everything today, TV, Radio, Internet, Newspapers, public/private space, Clothing, ... also doubles as an advertisement delivery pipeline.
I can't imagine using the internet without an ad-blocker anymore, it's already such a different experience.
This is why there is such a strong push to content marketing, which is essentially the brands becoming media companies.
This is also why native ad units (not just advertorials but any ad unit that Is the atomic consumption unit of the site like news feed ads, AdWords ads, etc...) Work much better than display, because they are value add and are essentially the flip side of content marketing.
I think the future, sustainable strategies will be user experiences that naturally progress into buying. (I.e. a content site selling premium content or hosting a conference or a Saas product using a freemium model.)
Maybe ads are called ads because they should be adding value.
The research[1] says otherwise.
<And ugly.
Subjective. I'd argue these[2] are anything but.
[1]http://www.arbitron.com/downloads/InCarStudy2009.pdf
[2]http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/brilliant-creative-billboard-ad...
On the highway, most of the billboard ads are for businesses positioned near the highway.
I don't think highway billboards and in-town billboards are realistically in the same advertising market, even if they have similar form factors.
Clever and eye-grabbing is strictly for in-town boards. The same people will see this message multiple times, perhaps even twice a day.
Highway billboards have to be simple and informative, and highly relevant to travelers. People may only see these once, ever.
When I'm on the highway, I won't even look at billboards unless one of the following applies:
- need food
- need gas
- need a toilet
says that billboards help sell stuff. So do online ads. Unfortunately there's no RL ad block for those of us who don't like ugly.
> I'd argue these[2] are anything but.
I'll take nature or architecture, thanks.
And then he compares it to the FB CTR of 0.05%
0.05% is not accurate. It's likely what you'll hit if you have no idea what you're doing, or just don't care because you're an agency advertising a clueless big brand. But it's not that hard to hit a 1-3% CTR on FB now -- especially with the newsfeed ads. Even using standard IAB display it's not too difficult to hit a 1-2% CTR.
Last, the 78% CTR is suspect. I wouldn't just believe it blindly. It does make sense that it would be high (I.e. 20-30%) given that people weren't used to banner ads at the time. Additionally, it's a Trick to Click ad that would never be Approved today. And I've even tried out of curiosity, and it was immediately slapped by reviewers ("I bet you can't click your mouse right here")
Facebook introduced newsfeed ads in 2012, and this article might (?) date from as far back as 2011, going by the statistics and dates cited in it. I might be wrong about that, but I do know it's an older article. Andrew doesn't date these blog posts, but I remember reading this article years ago.
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2012-04-05T11:50:46+00:00" />
Even still, the point stands: the article was published before newsfeed ads debuted (in June '12), and certainly before their use became commonplace enough to establish benchmark CTRs.