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Sarah Worsham

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Your Customers May Soon Be Voting On Your Ads

A growing number of marketers are taking their chances with having their ads rated, and possibly banished, on social networks and community-oriented Web services that have grown popular by inviting users to rate what they see. – This Ad Stinks: Let Readers Vote – Business Week

Websites and social networks which allow their readers to vote on advertisements may provide you valuable feedback for your marketing campaigns. However, they may also humiliate your company on a public stage. Learning how ratings work on a site/network and whether there is any chance for removal are key to understanding the risks involved in being involved on these sites.

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Text Ads – Advantages & Disadvantages

Text ads come in several different forms, including link ads, contextual ads, pay-per-click and online directories. These ads have several advantages & disadvantages to consider before purchasing them to promote your website, products or services.

Advantages

  • Cheap – Since these ads are just text they are usually the cheapest type of online advertising you can purchase.
  • Search Engine Friendly – These ads are often are embedded right in the webpage which gives search engine ranking to your site. This is not always the case and many websites will demand that these ads go into their ad serving systems for tracking and security reasons.
  • Attention – Since they are only text, these ads are less annoying to readers, so they are actually more likely to read and click on them, especially contextual ads. Readers are less likely to classify them as ads which need to be ignored.
  • Easy – Creating a text ad is as easy as thinking of the text. Creating engaging text within the character limits can be a bit more challenging.

Disadvantage

  • Limited – Most text ads have character limits which restrict the amount of information you can convey. Text ads by their very technology convey less information than rich media ads and some display ads.
  • Little Information – Information collected about text ads is usually limited to impressions, clicks and possibly some information about who clicked on the ad (if the site has registration tied to their ad serving – more on analytics in a future post).
  • Not Accepted – Some websites do not accept text ads since they can demand higher rates for display ads.

If you’re new to advertising, text ads are a great place to start for ease-of-use and budget.

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Measuring the Effectiveness of Display Ads

Here are the basics for measuring the effectiveness of your display ads:

  • Impressions: How many times is the ad served to a person (or as near as can be estimated). Impressions to search engine crawlers and bots should be filtered out (most ad servers do this automatically).
  • Clicks: How many times someone clicked on the ad (and was taken to your website – remember to target the landing page). This should also filter out search engine crawlers and bots.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100 for a percentage. This number will typically be pretty small. CTR of 3% is very good for rich media ads, but will quickly decrease the longer the ad is left on a website. Many CTR will be under 1%. This is an indicator of how effective the ads is or how many times the ad was seen each time before it was clicked on.

Also important are:

  • Unique Visitors (UV): As near as the ad server can tell to the number of actual people who have seen your ad. This is usually measured by IP address (think of this is your Internet address) – but several people can share the same IP address (like all the people at an apartment building). This sometimes is measured with a cookie or login to a website to get better accuracy.
  • Share of Voice (SOV): How many other ads are you sharing space with on the website? I’ve seen this measured in terms of share of impressions on the whole website or section or as the share of ads on a page (impressions is more common). More importantly, this is a measure of how many other ads are competing with your ad for readers to look at it. The better the share of voice, the more likely people are to notice and click on your ad.

Most important to measuring the effectiveness of any ad is how it is fulfilling your goals for advertising. Are you advertising to improve your brand awareness? Then the number of impressions your ad gets is important. Are you trying to sell products? Then clicks and click-through-rate are important as well as how many of those clicks are resulting in a sale on your site. Remember, statistics are just a tool to measure effectiveness. First you need to set goals for your advertising and understand how to use available statistics and tools to measure how effective your ads are at reaching those goals (more on that planned in a future post).

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