Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/4kp8gKPskWY/in-early-tests-99-wii-balance-board-outperforms-17885-medical-rig
Another day, another story about some cheap, plastic Wii motion control accessory finding an application outside of gaming. In this case, it’s the balance board, and not only is this device helping stroke victims recover, it’s saving them money, too.
In fact, doctors at the University of Melbourne found that the balance board, normally used for pseudo Yoga or navigating Mii’s down a virtual ski slope, was so sensitive it could very well replace traditional laboratory-grade “force platforms” doctors use to assess a patient’s balance.
When doctors disassembled the board, they found the accelerometers and strain gauges to be of “excellent” quality. “I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up,” said lead researcher Ross Clark, in an interview with New Scientist.
Even better, Clark’s team has already published a paper that verifies the Wii balance board is “clinically comparable” to the nearly $18,000 lab force platform. That’s great news for many smaller physio clinics that would otherwise be unable to afford the traditional rig. [New Scientist]
Tags: accelerometers, application, balance, balance board, board, case, cheap, Clark, control, day, device, fact, finding, force, force platform, force platforms, gaming, gauge, gawker, great news, interview, lab, laboratory grade, Melbourne, Mii, money, motion, motion control, New, new scientist, news, Paper, patient, physio, physio clinics, plastic, Platform, price, pseudo, quality, researcher, rig, Ross Clark, scientist, ski, ski slope, slope, Source, story, strain, strain gauge, stroke, stroke victims, team, tmpPost, traditional laboratory, University, university of melbourne, virtual ski, Wii, Yoga
marketing misconceptions
- “behavioral targeting” – the belief that people’s surfing behavior will indicate what they are likely to buy — of all my surfing, only a small portion of it is related to doing product research before I buy something, and it is usually limited to the few days or weeks just before the purchase. What advertisers don’t know is how to distinguish this finite surfing behavior which IS related to upcoming purchases from the rest of my surfing behavior which is NOT.
advertising misconceptions
- “targeting” – of course some targeting is better than no targeting (e.g. after-shave ads targeted to men vs women) but even with targeting (e.g. daypart, demographics, specific TV show spot) ads are still “shot” at large audience “buckets” and do not take into account the dozens of other parameters which come into play between the awareness of a product and its purchase (e.g. I just bought a mini van and no matter how many or how accurate mini van ads are, I will not buy another mini van.)
- “reach and frequency”- reach is “how many people you beat over the head with an ad message” and frequency as “how often you do so.”
- gross rating points – an approximation of approximations of estimates of round numbers of probabilities which currently guide the spending of billions of dollars on push advertising — that’s why they call it “gross”
social media misconceptions
- “social media” – thinking that people’s conversations are a form of “media” that can be purchased or “generated” by advertising; and that there is enough of it to achieve the “reach and frequency” advertisers are accustomed to in traditional advertising.
- thinking you can appoint or delegate either by an agency or an intern your precrafted voice in to people’s conversations. (it should be you or someone with a control over issues in the company, it’s not just talk)
- thinking its just talk
- thinking people are there to listen to your marketing pitch
- thinking if you spent enough time chattering you can start selling (you have to add value or no one will buy your product just because you have good bedside manners)
SEO (search engine optimization; organic search) misconceptions
- thinking you can buy links and rise to number 1 in no time
SEM (paid search) misconceptions
- thinking people search for your advertising (people search for information)
Direct Marketing misconceptions
Contributor: Tugce ESENER
Tags: account, advertisers, advertising, advertising misconceptions, Agency, approximation, approximations, audience, awareness, bedside, bedside manners, behavior, belief, belief that, billions of dollars, buckets, com, company, Contributor, control, conversations, course, daypart, demographics, Direct, direct marketing, direct marketing misperceptions, dozens, engine, engine optimization organic search, ESENER, few days, form, frequency, Gmail, gross rating points, guide, head, information, intern, marketing, marketing misconceptions, matter, message, mini, mini van, misconceptions, misperceptions, NOT, number, number 1, optimization, parameters, people search, pitch, play, portion, probabilities, Product, product research, purchase, purchase advertising, push, Rating, reach, research, rest, ris, rise, round, search, search engine optimization, SEM, SEO, shot, show, small portion, social media misconceptions, someone, something, spending, Spot, spot ads, talk, time, traditional advertising, Tugce, tv show, value, van, voice
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.
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.
- visual discovery, share, and queue management interface for Netflix
- visual discovery and sampling interface for music (Amazon backend)
- create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)
- visual display of your friends (closest ones have the most recent status updates)
- 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).
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.
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.”
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.
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Wired’s Steven Levy takes us inside the “algorithm that rules the web“—Google’s search algorithm, of course—and if you use Google, it’s kind of a must-read. PageRank? That’s so 1997.
Recent Articles by Dr. Augustine Fou
