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We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

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Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#61

Post by julespitt »

egypturnash wrote: post #54

We have no idea if online ads actually work at the scale of huge corporate brands competing for mindshare . I'm pretty sure it works for smaller outfits - every time I find an appropriate place to run an ad campaign, I see a permanant uptick in readers of my web comic. Eventually I'll have gotten everyone in that place who's going to be interested in my stuff, and I move on.

Willing to share where you advertise and why? I've got lots of friends and relatives doing comics online, would love to have a little specialist knowledge to help them out.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#62

Post by Theodores »

michh wrote: post #19

I remember reading the tobacco industry was actually secretly grateful when the EU banned them from advertising. As I remember it, they were in a stale-mate. The market was pretty much divided up. Most people were loyal to their brand and that was that. Despite that, they were spending a massive amount of money on advertising even though their market shares remained unchanged. The reason was that if one of them stopp…

Tobacco advertising was never about trying to persuade existing smokers to switch brands - that was the 'cover story'. In reality it was about trying to persuade young people to smoke their brand rather than some other brand. By young people Everything tobacco is controversial, however, how does this relate to online advertising for regular things? The only people who haven't heard of eBay will be people too young to have seen the adverts already. Same with every other brand. Everyone will know you can get everything and anything from Amazon. But there will always be this new supply of kids getting old enough to have their own debit card, they will also have impressionable minds and not have their habits cast in stone. Therefore the high pay per sale per click is actually about getting new life-long customers, in much the same way as it was for Big Tobacco.

The tobacco adverts appeared to be about persuading existing smokers to switch brands yet they had this secret darkside 'get em young' agenda. With online adverts there may be genuine 'switch brands' thinking to it yet in reality all that is effective is 'get em young', where this 'get em young' idea is not even being thought about or being looked for in the analytics.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#63

Post by blumkvist »

gumby wrote: post #14
zwieback wrote: post #6

There are also new annoying features of online advertising that might turn consumers off. Even after buying something I frequently see ads for the same exact product from the same exact vendor for several days. For some reason this annoys me so much that it turns me off from the vendor.

> ...after buying something I frequently see ads for the same exact product from the same exact vendor... There is a theoretical justification for that (note: "theory" not used in the scientific sense!) -- for large ticket items like cars, recent buyers are more likely to notice an ad for the expensive item they just bought. Some ads are aimed at them to make the whole "experience" somehow better, to offset buyer's r…

Please make a difference between marketing and advertising. Advertising is a very small part of marketing "science".

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#64

Post by egypturnash »

julespitt wrote: post #61
egypturnash wrote: post #54

We have no idea if online ads actually work at the scale of huge corporate brands competing for mindshare . I'm pretty sure it works for smaller outfits - every time I find an appropriate place to run an ad campaign, I see a permanant uptick in readers of my web comic. Eventually I'll have gotten everyone in that place who's going to be interested in my stuff, and I move on.

Willing to share where you advertise and why? I've got lots of friends and relatives doing comics online, would love to have a little specialist knowledge to help them out.

Mostly just Project Wonderful, an ad network that mostly sells ads on web comics. It's pretty easy to drop a couple hundred into a broad campaign, dink around in your analytics to see what sources give you engaged traffic, and drop some more money onto those specific places.

Also your friends and relatives may want to check out webcomics.com; I don't agree with everything Brad says about Making Comics On The Web but for the most part his site is full of a ton of great advice that's well worth the yearly fee.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#65

Post by rdtsc »

michh wrote: post #19

I remember reading the tobacco industry was actually secretly grateful when the EU banned them from advertising. As I remember it, they were in a stale-mate. The market was pretty much divided up. Most people were loyal to their brand and that was that. Despite that, they were spending a massive amount of money on advertising even though their market shares remained unchanged. The reason was that if one of them stopp…

That also describes presence at trade shows and conferences.

Quite often those are useless and costly in time and money. Yet companies do it because if they don't and the competitors do then everyone will ask "How come so and so wasn't at the show? Are they have financial issues?" and so on.

So companies spend money on booths and talks without getting much back except to stave off the appearance that something might be wrong.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#66

Post by rdtsc »

Theodores wrote: post #62
michh wrote: post #19

I remember reading the tobacco industry was actually secretly grateful when the EU banned them from advertising. As I remember it, they were in a stale-mate. The market was pretty much divided up. Most people were loyal to their brand and that was that. Despite that, they were spending a massive amount of money on advertising even though their market shares remained unchanged. The reason was that if one of them stopp…

Tobacco advertising was never about trying to persuade existing smokers to switch brands - that was the 'cover story'. In reality it was about trying to persuade young people to smoke their brand rather than some other brand. By young people Everything tobacco is controversial, however, how does this relate to online advertising for regular things? The only people who haven't heard of eBay will be people too young to…

I think they do a good job via product placement in movies and shows. Sometimes they are in "historic" or period pieces. I mean the ones create today by portraying historical periods. Sometimes there is what seems like a deliberate advertising or showing off someone lighting up. Sometimes it is cool villains so it works on a more subtle level "Oh see we are only show bad guys smoking, so we are dissuading young people to smoke".

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#67

Post by xux »

raverbashing wrote: post #15

The premise of the article is naive at best You can use web analytics to measure a conversion rate from ads. Hence user clicks ad -> sales happens (in the best cases). That's Internet Ads 101 In fact, with online ads the "if it works" part is much more measurable than for other medias "Last year, a group of economists working with eBay’s internal research lab issued a massive experimental study with a simple, startli…

The thing with big brand advertising is that they aren't trying to gain new customers. They're cementing their place in existing industry.

Coca Cola pretty much captured as much market as possible. Yet they still advertise to refresh their image.

"Even a great brand needs investment and caring to maintain its relevance and vitality." - Jobs

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#69

Post by gerbal »

jseliger wrote: post #59
gerbal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For medium scale purchases with many interchangeable competitors, this may be true. But for cheap impulse purchase and for high-end commodities, brand still matters quite a bit. Apple and Samsung are two great examples of higher end companies whose products aren't appreciably superior or inferior to most of their competitors, but through relentless advertising, they have made themselves seem distinct from their compe…

Apple and Samsung are two great examples of higher end companies whose products aren't appreciably superior or inferior to most of their competitors I'm not sure this is true: Samsung is not a (particularly) higher-end company, and their phones at least are lower cost than Apple. In the case of Apple, their phones were appreciably better up until two years ago or so. Their laptops have been physically better in fit a…

I didn't mean that Apple doesn't make good products. They make pretty damn good products. But the products are only part of Apple's marketing strategy.

Much of what has made Apple successful is the idea of what a Mac, an iPod, or an iPhone is. For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market, it was just the best marketed. In the case of macbooks, the hardware has been roughly on par with equivalently priced competitors for several years. But they sell the idea of what it means to be a 'mac person'. They get you invested in the idea that macs are better regardless of the reality.

And that strategy is as much about reassuring people who already own Apple products (fighting buyers remorse, and grass-is-greener impulses) as it is about selling more.

Re: We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work

#70

Post by theGimp »

michh wrote: post #55
tobinfricke wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NB, while tobacco ads are banned from TV, they are still everywhere on outdoor advertising, at least here in Germany. Actually, I went on a "street art tour" that turned out to be sponsored by a cigarette company, and they were handing out free cigarettes . So: tobacco advertising is alive and well in Germany.

Oh, over here that's been banned as well. I thought it was an EU thing but I guess it was our government. They're even banned from sponsoring events.

That is the case in Canada too. Tobacco companies have been banned from sponsoring events since sometime in 2003.
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