display advertising
Creepy – Dynamically Targeting Display Ads Based on Items and Pages Viewed
The 3 business projectors I viewed yesterday on NewEgg.com and the one I added to my shopping cart to check the “special” price now appear in a display ad on news site The Guardian.
Where’s “the line?” When will consumers rise up and say enough is enough and stop allowing advertisers to buy and sell their personal information without their permission for the sake of “targeting” them with more ads.
How to Make $1,000 a Day on Pinterest
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5896926/this-man-makes-1000-a-day-on-pinterest
And you thought Pinterest was only useful for lonely pastry fantasy. This anonymous conman talked to the Daily Dot, and boy does he have an easy job: fooling Pinterest’s lonely materialists into clicking Amazon spam links. For money.
It works like this. Pinterest Spammer creates thousands of fake accounts, probably with regular breaks to stare into the mirror, bleary-eyed, and ask if this is really happening. Then he proceeds. Thousands more accounts. He won’t reveal his method, but let’s assume, for our sanity and his, that it’s automated. Then his spam accounts “repin” the same goddamn picture of boots or Christmas ornaments or sequined sock puppets, ad infinitum, rocketing each image to the top of the site’s popularity charts. When you click the thing, you’re delivered to This Guy’s Amazon account.
The terrifying part? People then proceed to buy the things they’ve clicked on. Enough to generate thousands:
As the days came my earnings increased and increased and increased. First week of doing this I made around $2,000 which was Feb. 20-29. I stepped my game up and changed the way I was doing some things, and I saw a dramatic increase in my earnings. Went up to $500-800 a day. Kept at it and for the past two weeks I have made over $1,000 a day with the highest earnings being around $1,900.
I fully expect next week’s earnings to be $2,000-2,500 a day. There are no guarantees in this business and it could all come crashing down soon. Not a matter of if, but when will it happen.
Think about what you did at work today, or think about the fact that you’re unemployed, and then think about this, and then punch a hole through a car. [Daily Dot]
Google AdChoices – 8 ads per page? Do Advertisers Know About This?
What are AdChoices?
 |
The AdChoices icon appears on sites that use Google’s AdSense program to show ads. While Google often shows you ads based on the content of the page you are viewing, we also show some ads based on the types of websites you visit, view, or where you interact with an ad or other Google product supported by Google’s advertising services. In doing this, Google doesn’t know your name or any other personal information about you. Google simply recognizes the number stored in your browser on the DoubleClick cookie, and shows ads related to the interest and inferred demographic categories associated with that cookie. It’s our goal to make these ads as relevant and useful as possible for you. Google doesn’t create categories, or show ads, based on sensitive topics such as race, religion, sexual orientation, or health. |
Where can I learn more about how Google protects privacy?
- To learn more about how we collect and use information at Google, please visit our Privacy Center
What choices do I have about advertising from Google?
- Google lets you edit the categories associated with your browser, or opt out of personalized advertising, through Google’s Ads Preferences Manager.
- Google may use your Google account information, such as items you +1 on Google properties and across the web, to personalize content and ads on non-Google websites. If you’d like to control how you see +1 recommendations from people you know, and how your +1 recommendations are shown to others, please visit the +1 button account setting page.
Learn More!
- Learn more about online advertising from the Network Advertising Initiative.
- Find more on browser controls and plug-in tools to help set and maintain your privacy choices.
Marketing Costs Normalized to CPM Basis for Comparison
Comparing costs of various media channels, on a CPM basis – cost per thousand impressions basis.
SOURCE: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2126376/newspapers-money-online
SOURCE: http://www.handmadeology.com/etsy-ad-pricing-comparing-them-to-the-competition/
UPDATED: January 30, 2013. See also Comparative Media Costs Offline and Online
Facebook’s Magic Number 16%
One secret reason why Facebook ad revenues haven’t quite taken off like they should – and are, in fact, decelerating – is that for years now, brands have advertised on Facebook without paying Facebook.
Here’s how they’ve been doing it:
- Brands build a “page” on Facebook.
- Facebook users become “fans” of that brand page, thanks in part to ad campaigns off Facebook.
- The brands post video, photos, or text to the page.
- That content goes into fans’ News Feeds.
Not 1, Not 2, Not 3, But 4 Display Ads Per Pageview – Shame on You Facebook
Updated May 12, 2012. Freddy Nager, Prof of Integrated Marketing at UCLA sent me a screen shot showing 9 display ads per page. The unscupulosity of Facebook is at an all time high – right up to their IPO.
THANKS Freddy Nager @AtomicTango, Prof of Integrated Marketing, UCLA for the screen grab of 9 and 10 ads per page.
http://atomictango.com/2012/04/20/myspace-facebook-continued/
Updated February 3, 2012. This is how Facebook is growing ad revenues – SEVEN DISPLAY ADS PER PAGE – EVIL!
But despite this kind of “cheating” their revenues are decelerating. And there is the “danger” of advertisers getting smart and changing from paying on a CPM basis to paying only on a CPC basis — paying only when they get the click. That would mean Facebook’s revenue could drop off a cliff.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-revenues-are-decelerating-2012-2
Updated: FIVE (count ‘em) 5 ads per page – SHAME on you Facebook – the highway robbery gets worse. Advertisers, quick, go to CPC (don’t pay CPMs any more).
Multiple ads on the same page run up the impression numbers, but artificially depress click-throughs because even if they wanted to, users can only click on one ad at a time. Shame on your Facebook for overtly and systematically robbing advertisers who pay on a CPM basis.
But then again shame on you advertisers who still pay CPMs when you can easily click a radio button to select CPC — Facebook even suggests a range for you automatically (see inset below).
What is the advantage of paying by CPC (cost per click) instead of CPM (cost per thousand impressions)? Well, remember the old ad industry joke “I know I am wasting half my ad dollars, I just don’t know which half” — well, now you know. In fact, you now know you are wasting 99% of your ad dollars to wasted impressions that get no action/clicks from users AND you know which 99%. See infographic below. So stop paying CPMs and start paying CPCs TODAY. Your ad budget will thank you!
Just how DISMAL are Facebook advertising metrics and benchmarks (click to see )?
According to data from comScore, in Q3 2010, Facebook served 297 billion display ad impressions giving it 23% of the U.S. market for display ads. In digital channels, since there is no longer the physical limitation of time (airtime on TV) or space (area to put ads on dead-tree pulp) companies can create “inventory” out of thin air and magically increase revenue on the backs of advertisers still willing to pay for impressions. I guess it really is caveat emptor.
Do you know where your ads are being shown?
Protecting brand reputation is the #2 top concern among advertisers, according to a 2009 Aberdeen Group study. And yet, there is still not much they can do to see where, next to what, or in what context their ads are being shown.
RTB – real-time bidding may make ad exchanges more efficient, but it still won’t save display (ads)
in response to this mediapost article
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=113621
While RTB will make ad exchanges even more efficient, it may not be that necessary.
RTB depends on 3 things: 1) inventory, which depends on how many people hit the page to generate an impression, 2) clicks, which depend on people clicking something, and 3) bidders, the more niche you get, the fewer bidders there will be. Inventory does not change rapidly. Clicks take time to accumulate (to yield click rates, which are a necessary ingredient in the RTB calculation). And if there are too few bidders the price of the auction “item” won’t appreciate or depreciate much or rapidly. Because of these 3 things, making bidding real-time versus non-real-time (i.e. overnight) may not make it significantly better or move the needle much on efficiency and ROI.
And RTB will still not save “display” ads. The golden age of display was in the mid 90s when people tolerated ads when they read content. They are now trained to avoid looking at the top and right of web pages So while RTB may increase the ROI of display ads by increasing click rates from a percentage with too many zeros to count to something sligtly higher, display ads are still ignored by users and will still not generate measurable business impact for advertisers.
Facebook advertising metrics and benchmarks
Update Jan 2014
Summary
Facebook click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% (Facebook CTRs)
Facebook effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 (Facebook eCPMs)
Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)
Other social media benchmarks from my experiments (Adwords, StumbleUpon, PayPerPost / Izea) can be found here.
Comparison of click-through rates for search ads versus display ads
As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.
I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.
http://apps.facebook.com/netflixr/
- visual discovery, share, and queue management interface for Netflix
http://apps.facebook.com/musicsamplr/
- visual discovery and sampling interface for music (Amazon backend)
http://apps.facebook.com/phreetings/
- create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)
http://apps.facebook.com/visualfriends/
- visual display of your friends (closest ones have the most recent status updates)
http://apps.facebook.com/myfavethings/
- social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want
But what I found was eye-opening to say the least. Despite the potential of social ads where the social actions of your circle of friends could make the ads more targeted, none of the anticipated positive effects were observed. Despite the promise of mass reach, there was not the corresponding attention or clicks. And despite the use of demographics-based targeting, there was no statistically significant difference between different targets nor the control sample, running during the same time period.
What we saw were click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% — and the 0.01% often seemed like rounding because they did not report more than 2 decimal places. As a result of these click rates the effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 and average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25. I’ve been running these Facebook ads for more than 12 months; and millions of impresisons later, there is no observable improvements to CTRs and thus CPMs and CPCs. But since I set up the campaigns to only pay when there is a click (CPC basis), I can let these run indefinitely because I am getting so few clicks, it’s not even making a dent on my credit card (which I use to pay for the ads).
detail of low click through rates of facebook display ads
Ideas for Facebook
In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.
1. reduce the number of ads per page to 1 – displaying multiple ads artificially depresses click-through rates because users can only click on 1 thing at a time, even if they liked more than one of them. Displaying 3 on a page simply increases the denominator while the numerator does not increase — in the click-through rate equation: clicks / impressions.
2. make ads sharable – in the rare instance a user views an ad, it may or may not be relevant to her, but she may know that it is relevant and timely for a friend. By making ads sharable, she can click and send to a friend, who is very likely to find it useful and valuable, especially having been sent by a friend.
3. let users opt-in to ads in specific topic categories - when users are in the market for specific things, they are more likely to subscribe to pertinent news feeds, offers, etc. related to that topic or category. By giving users more power over what they want to see, it will also give advertisers more targeted and engaged prospects to target.
4. expand search-based advertising – when users search they are looking for something and are open to discovering something they didn’t know to ask for. So ads served up in response to a search is usually a lot more effective than ads served up simply when a page is loaded (display advertising). Facebook can serve display ads based on pertinent search queries.
Earth to Facebook… anyone listening?
By Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer at Healthcare Consultancy Group a group of agencies within the Omnicom family specializing in pharma and healthcare. He helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can read more of his writing on digital marketing on this blog and follow him on twitter @acfou.
Revision 6/30/2009: Facebook Click Fraud
Excerpt from TechCrunch: “Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor.” On Facebook, “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI.”
“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts. The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max.”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/facebook-click-fraud-101/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/21/facebook-admit-click-fraud-problem-says-fix-coming-today/
Despite click fraud, the click through rates are still incredibly low. So if you subtract all the click fraud, is ANY advertiser making ANY money from facebook advertising?
Others have found similarly dismal click through rates from Facebook advertising
Source: http://www.friendswithbenefitsbook.com/2008/04/07/facebook-ad-click-through-rates-are-really-pitiful/
Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful
April 7, 2008 – 5:03 pm
Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.
First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:
This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.
Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:
Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.
He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.
The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:
Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.
From AllFacebook:
Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.
And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:
Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.
Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.
Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?
We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.
Digital Consigliere
Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.
http://twitter.com/acfou
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Published Articles by Dr. Augustine Fou
- Brand Advertisers: Escaping an Ecosystem of Digital Advertising Fraud
- #SESNY: Toward a Performance Mindset for All Advertising
- Tips for Marketers Selecting a Digital Agency
- Context Is Not King or Queen; It's Just Necessary
- 2013 New Year's Digital Marketing Resolutions
- The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Online Campaign Ratings and eGRPs
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