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Methinks thou doth protest too much. This is wrong. It should be: thou dost protest too much . Just saying.
If you've got a team of smart people willing to drop $500k on a banner campaign and you can accurately measure the results and it's still worth it with all the fraud, good for you. If you're a mom and pop store looking to spend $500 on advertisements they should be made aware there's a good chance they will be defrauded unless they know what they are doing.
For example: my wife has written a sci-fi novel. You can buy an eBook or paperback on Amazon. We would have to spend a few thousand dollars a month to acquire a single, purchasing reader. In contrast, I can drop around $100 on a booth at a book fair and sell 50 copies in about 8 hours. And we get almost all of those people to sign up for the mailing list (and almost all of them remember their email address well enough and have good enough handwriting to ensure it's a valid address). I don't get any chance to reconnect with my paying customers with just Amazon.
No, I'm sure it doesn't scale as well, but we don't have anywhere near the money it would take to scale online advertising to even those low of sales numbers. But we have a large enough margin on the paperback (we're self publishing and print-on-demand has gotten pretty cheap) that we typically break even for the combined print/booth costs. Similarly, growing the mailing list for when we finish editing the next book (which will be any day now) has been a lot easier in-person.
From the article:
We use them to measure the efficacy of campaigns we run our way, using our metrics.
We’ll spend a million bucks on a literal f**k ton of banners (I mean, just billions
of the things, it’s crazy). And then we’ll do targeted brand sentiment and purchase-
intent surveys using our internal peeps, online along with companies like Nielsen and
Foresee, and offline with a bunch of (really quite awesome) companies you’ve never
heard of. Then we’ll see whether the banners moved the needle, and if they did (and
they often do), we’re happy.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873249040045785371...
> An astounding 54% of online display ads shown in "thousands" of campaigns measured by comScore Inc. between May of 2012 and February of this year weren't seen by anyone, according to a study completed last month.
> Don't confuse "weren't seen" with "ignored." These ads simply weren't seen, the result of technical glitches, user habits and fraud.
If you've got a team of smart people willing to drop $500k on a banner campaign and you can accurately measure the results and it's still worth it with all the fraud, good for you. If you're a mom and pop store looking to spend $500 on advertisements they should be made aware there's a good chance they will be defrauded unless they know what they are doing.
I think the article's point is that, if you compare banners to physical billboards, then you have the same issue but the billboard still works. So even your theoretical mom and pop store is getting value out of the impressions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the article's point is that, if you compare banners to physical billboards, then you have the same issue but the billboard still works. So even your theoretical mom and pop store is getting value out of the impressions.
There is no value to "impressions". Impressions != sales. Sales are the only thing we should be counting as value. Focusing on impressions is how we get click-fraud in the first place.
The vast majority of ads for luxury cars, for example, aren't going to elicit an immediate purchase, but still provide value for the automaker down the line.
Obviously the ads have to eventually lead to sales, but an immediate and trackable sale isn't always an option.
I detest advertising. It's literally designed to undermine reason and supplant critical evaluation of ones needs and priorities. As for web advertising, maybe I was the last person on the planet to figure this out but sometime late last year the web just became unusable on most popular news sites. Popover ads that come up before you can read the content and multiple large ads inline with the content and that "no mans…
Yes, some (a lot? Most?) advertisers get way out of hand. But advertising is not itself evil. It's a tool that may or may not be misused.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no value to "impressions". Impressions != sales. Sales are the only thing we should be counting as value. Focusing on impressions is how we get click-fraud in the first place.
While sales resulting from ad impressions are important (i.e. direct response ads), wouldn't you also agree ads for establishing branding are important as well? The vast majority of ads for luxury cars, for example, aren't going to elicit an immediate purchase, but still provide value for the automaker down the line. Obviously the ads have to eventually lead to sales, but an immediate and trackable sale isn't always…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ad networks won't go for it outside of very specific and narrow use cases (high-end ecommerce) because they don't have control over the quality of the landing page, a crucial element in whether the user converts or not.
Exactly. Ad networks will optimize for cost per acquisition but won't charge based on it since they don't control that part of the pipeline. If advertiser's landing page is down for example, the loss shouldn't fell on the ad network.
The author somehow felt that the ones talking about the problem with banners were being arrogant assuming that the buying industry didn't know that for ages, so his answer to this was: 'I will be even more arrogant, more patronizing than they ever could be!!'.
Really, that was a boring read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While sales resulting from ad impressions are important (i.e. direct response ads), wouldn't you also agree ads for establishing branding are important as well? The vast majority of ads for luxury cars, for example, aren't going to elicit an immediate purchase, but still provide value for the automaker down the line. Obviously the ads have to eventually lead to sales, but an immediate and trackable sale isn't always…
Startups aren't luxury car brands. If you're selling a product or service, I think you establish brand by making happy customers. That first requires a sale.
In some cases, that may be right, but in general branding begins the first time someone interacts with your product (or even your industry). If I notice your business name on Google SERPS, I am engaging with your brand.
I didn't really use NewRelic for 2 years after I first heard of it, but I did keep seeing them and speaking to them at events, reading blog posts, etc. Eventually, I signed up and paid for the product. What convinced me to do that was the branding work they did before I became a customer.
Even for freemium products, the business builds a brand to encourage people to invest the effort into signing up. Even government services (e.g. in the UK - the BBC, the NHS) do branding work.
Branding doesn't start at the point the customer enters their credit card.
Lovemarks is a good read on branding - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lovemarks-Effect-Winning-Consumer-Re...