I’m in sales myself. Just yesterday after a couple of attempts trying to reach a large cosmetics company in the US, I received a phone call.

I was asked some questions about how the pricing works and if we calculated it by CPM or by clicks. We offer some pretty decent numbers as far as impressions and they are definitely of quality, targeting a mid to upscale 21-35 year old demo, approx 3/4 female.

When at some point in the conversation I mentioned that we have an open mind and we do custom packages according to the clients budgets/needs, I was asked if we “guarantee clicks.”
I said “no we dont” (big mistake!)
She arrogantly replied “well, some sites do.” And the convo didn’t really continue as I would have liked, terminating shortly after.

Based on our history of corporate campaigns, I’d have to say 80 to 90% of our clients were pleased and somewhat impressed to the response generated from our website compared to our competitors. This is why we’re still around after 7 years. =)

Tell me what you want and we’ll set you up to get the maximum amount of clicks you desire. Guaranteeing clicks seems a little far fetched (and based on this write up) clicks dont mean much, if they’re not quality.

1. Number of people who never read Text Ads vs number of people who occasionally/always(anyone?) read these ads.
2. Number of people who think Graphical Ads make an impact vs number of those who think text ads are better.

This will be incredibly useful to get new insights into the advertising reality.

The results for the large FMCG advertiser in terms of brand awareness and offline sales (3rd party research via Tesco Supermarkets) showed a far better ROI for this online, brand focused advertising than the client could get from online.

It’s this sort of online advertising that’s going to keep the ad spend flowing into online and away from other mediums.

I’ve sent my blog to all my friends, bloglists, rankings and everywhere I could. Just to give it a try, I’ve recently added AdSense ads to my blog to see what happened. Believe me users hardly click on them. Ads are good and very related to the content but experienced users that like reading my blog won’t never click on them, they just read my blog and skip ads. In fact, I also do it this way in other blogs…

Thus, ads seems to me a really difficult world, that sure will not make me rich enough to dedicate 100% of my time to blogging. A pity…

PS: By the way, I would really appreciate if you visit my blog and click on some of my ads

Best regards.

Not all ads are created equal and not all landing pages work to grab a users attention. If you are running a campaign you need to create several variations of both your ad text and your landing pages. You need to keep tweeking this until you get it right.

Google analyics is a pretty good tool to use. It allows to to create several ad variations and landing pages then define a conversion page. The conversion page is the web page where you have converted the sale.

Wrong. It just shows you just how useless advertising in general really is. Online ads are just the only place where we can accurately measure its uselessness.

Jakeimade
http://www.adimade.com

This is why billions of dollars continue to flow into the medium? You don’t give sophisticated advertisers, or agencies for that matter, any credit whatsoever. Do you honestly believe they would continue to piss money out the window if there wasn’t ROI?

As a small business owner, yes, Google PPC model absolutely sucks for our business and I believe the vast majority of clicks we had seen on our recent endeavor in this area were purely curiousity seekers/flat out fraudulent. However, I wouldn’t make a broad stroke comment about how useless online advertising is. It all boils down to what you’re selling, whom you’re trying to sell to, and where and when your ads are displayed. Also many advertisers are attacking the market through various channels, and are getting increasingly sophisticated in how they market and measure success. Online is an area they need to be in.

I say this because I have worked in the industry for quite some time, and I have first hand experience in seeing online advertising prove to be incredibly valuable for “certain” advertisers.

I agree with the post about measuring clicks. A CTR is just a leading indicator, and outside of CPC deals where number of clicks are a factor for calculating cost of conversion, most advertisers could care less about clicks and are most concerned with conversions (sales, reg’s, etc.), cost of conversion and scalability of a particular publisher/network.

Branding advertisers are a whole other ball of wax.

Goodbye Facebook’s Valuation

$15 Billion, for what? Broke college students and an average click thru rate that’s .002% … half of which is totally worthless.

Yay.

Great site, I have it bookmarked now I also have to agree with you that if you are in a specific niche market, targeted ad campaigns are the way to go, sites that I develop that are targeted have far higher “advertising generated profit margins” then generic ones. I am surprised anybody puts any advertising on hotmail, facebook or other sites where the focus is on building relationships and not actually looking for something of interest. I am not surprised by the findings of this study, I have to agree with others, these numbers are still too generous.

Jon
http://i3ds.com - Custom 3D and Programming Services

and that cost even more and you can not measure sight/conversion at all

that is why CTR ads are still better I think

Could someone please do a report on Google and show everyone just what a lousy online advertising company it is.
Think of all the huge number of annual Page Hits it reaches across its own Search Site. Then add those Page Hits across its other Sites such as YouTube, Blogger, Google Maps, that also display Ads.
And finally add the number of Page Hits that feature Google AdSense, such as MySpace and various other Sites.

Once you get a final Page Hits total that feature all of Google’s Three Advertising Models, compare that to the annual revenues that Google made online through this form of advertising - and calculate just how much money Google made from the amount of Page Hits that their Ads were featured on.
(Don’t forget to take away a large percentage of Click Fraud Ads)

Even with Google’s huge online audience reach. The amount of money that they earn through their Three Advertisings Models is very poor.
It just shows you just how useless Online Advertising really is.

There are people working on such a site:

http://www.workpost.com

We recognize that there are groups of people who click on ads for a reason, groups who click but have no idea why and are essentially useless to advertisers and groups who see ads as nothing more than annoyance (Digg). We believe that contractors, freelancers and, in general, people looking for work and to get work done are among the groups that click on ads with a purpose. Workpost.com is very new and we have a lot of work to do in terms of marketing but we hope to create a site that will be able to support meaningful ads relevant to the content of and locations where people are searching and posting.

We already have some excellent development help but if anyone out there is interested in these kinds of issues or working on sites like this, please contact us. We’re open to all kinds of ideas.

Thanks,

- Workpost.com

“Don’t advertise on sites aimed at people with little money?
IE, social networking and digg???

http://www.ccr.gov/Contractors.aspx
If somebody made a site targeting these people, then that would be a gold mine. Unlike MySpace. Strangely enough, there aren’t many or they aren’t popular.”