Tag Archives: Online advertising

December 3, 2015 · 12:55 pm

Hurry Up!

I know you all want to hear another rant on ad blocking about as much as you’d like to hear an endless loop of Tiny Tim singing Tiptoe Thru The Tulips.  I’ll keep it brief, therefore.  A company called Soasta did some research with the Harris folks about what website users were looking for as they surf around.  Not surprisingly, they found the following (as reported by eMarketer):Most Important Attributes of Website Performance According to US Internet Users, Sep 2015 (% of respondents)

When it comes to website performance, internet users say personalized content is less important than a website’s ease of navigation and speed, according to a September 2015 survey. More than three-quarters of US internet users said that a leading attribute of website performance was that it was easy to navigate. Another top attribute was speed; 73% of respondents indicated so.

Here is a truism (at least one I’ve found) about digital interactions: people hate impediments.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a landing page from an ad that doesn’t go directly to the reason someone clicked on the ad or if it’s just a plain old web page.  People are pressed for time.  Any impediment we put in their way has a high likelihood of derailing the interaction.  Web pages that are slow to load because of external calls get closed.  For you non-technical people, that means when the page calls out for an ad (especially if it needs to fill the ad via a programmatic auction), or some behavioral tracker, or anything else like analytics.  Popups are an impediment as well – it’s something in between the user and what they are trying to do. The research bears this out.  Personalization, on the other hand, can help speed up the interaction since it’s based on the user’s likes and preferences.

Ad blockers generally speed up page loads.  That is one of the main reasons people use them besides avoiding tracking.  If we help people hurry up, maybe they will, in return, be more responsive to the marketing information we present instead of doing all they can to avoid it.

Make sense?  What are your thoughts?

 

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October 29, 2015 · 11:22 am

Intruders

You can’t read anything having to do with marketing these days without running into some mention of ad blocking. It seems as if the entire industry is wringing its collective hands about the revenues lost due to the blockers. It doesn’t seem, however, that there has been a great deal of discussion about how the problem came to be. I’m not going to regurgitate a blow-by-blow of the last couple of years in ad tech, but there are a few important points that are worth pointing out.  

The first, and foremost, is that actions have consequences. You probably tell your kids that all the time but as an industry we seem to have forgotten. Publishers are cramming more and more advertising onto a page. But that action may be the result of the downward push of pricing that’s a function of the rush to programmatic buying. Rather than paying for quality, marketers seem more concerned with a lower CPM. That’s a nasty set of actions.

The consequence of popups, cluttered pages, and slow load times, married to incessant retargeting (which means we’re being tracked!) is ad blocking. According to one survey, 51% of US internet users agree that companies are too often intrusive on social media. Another survey says they feel all of the push notifications we send out are not relevant or are intrusive. There is that word again: intrusive.

The single biggest change in marketing and media over the last decade has been that consumers have all of the control. They don’t watch the prepackaged lineups that networks have been feeding for almost a century (if you take the dawn of commercial radio as the beginning). The world is now user-controlled and curated. Why would an intruder be welcomed?  Why are marketers and consumers in conflict, when one’s entire mission is to help the other to make informed buying decisions?

No answers today, just guidance.  We need to stop intruding.  Even the best creative messaging is intrusive when you see it for the 23rd time in a week.  We need to help publishers provide an environment in which the consumer feels welcome, and the only way to do that is to reduce clutter by paying for the value the publishers provide.  Not every empty space is screaming for an ad.  Some folks are getting it – Turner says they’re reducing ad time on some networks.  Let’s see who is wise enough to follow.

I’ve admitted to using ad blocking myself.  It’s not a great experience – pages break or won’t load fairly often – but it’s better than the minute and a half load times I’d face otherwise.  It’s doing a decent job of keeping the intruders at bay, and the odds are the walls are going to get higher if we don’t change as an industry.  Our actions have consequences and those consequences are becoming more clear every day.

Thoughts?

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May 12, 2014 · 10:45 am

Tracking Do Not Track

Yahoo! has taken a number of steps forward over the last couple of years as it tries to grow its business.

Deutsch: Logo von Yahoo

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think they took a large one backward last week as they made an announcement that they had reversed course on the issue of “do not track” settings.  Let’s see what you think.

If you’ve ever gone to get some information on a product and then seen ads for that or similar products for the next month, welcome to the world of “ad personalization.”  It can also be called behavioral targeting although I tend to classify that more for the content presented to a visitor on a web site than to ads that are served up across the web.  Regardless, it can be great if it reminds you of a sale on an item you really want or massively painful if you were checking something out for a spouse or friend that is of no interest to you and the ads just won’t go away.  We will often buy children’s books for friends’ new arrivals and my inbox is littered with emails of new kiddie books.

Two years ago, Yahoo! said it would honor something that’s built into every browser:  do not track settings.  These request that the site you’re visiting not collect data about your visit for the purposes of ad targeting and remarketing.  Key word:  request. Yahoo! said it would honor those requests until it reversed itself last week.  As Media Post reported:

Yahoo still allows users to opt out of receiving behaviorally targeted ads by clicking on a link — either on its own site, or an umbrella site, like the one operated by the Networking Advertising Initiative. But privacy advocates say that opt-out links are problematic because they’re tied to cookies — and consumers who are especially privacy conscious often delete their cookies.

Then there was this report at about the same time:

The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation this week released a new tool aimed at helping consumers avoid online data collection and behaviorally targeted ads. Privacy Badger — an add-on for Chrome and Firefox — says it “blocks spying ads and invisible trackers.” The EFF says that the tool, still in alpha testing, is its “answer to intrusive and objectionable practices in the online advertising industry, and many advertisers’ outright refusal to meaningfully honor Do Not Track requests.”

So because most major sites’ attitude on do not track requests is “nah,” they’re setting themselves up for users to take matters into their own hands and prevent the gathering of data beyond what is needed for the ad tracking.  As someone who uses visit data to improve the user experience as well as the consumption of my clients’ content I can tell you that if the quantity and quality of all the data declines, so will the overall usefulness and quality of the web. We talk in digital marketing about user signals – someone entering a sales funnel, someone requesting information.  If the other, less obvious, signals are made even harder to ascertain, the web economy is heading for a bumpy ride.

Thoughts?

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