Microsoft Says Not All Ad Clicks Are Created Equal 186
kyle6477 writes to share that Microsoft is hoping to change the way advertising is thought of, and ultimately valued, online. Their new Engagement ROI tool tries to track a user's ad clicking habits and distribute the credit over all of the ads that led to an eventual sale as opposed to the last ad clicked getting all the credit. "Say a consumer sees an ad for a product in a video ad one day, and then clicks on a text ad to visit the retailer's site the next day, and then eventually sees a banner ad that leads to a purchase. All of the monetary credit tends to go to the text link that was clicked on."
The Verio Linux ad is intriguing (Score:1, Insightful)
#1: root access gives you control
I've heard some stupid slogans, but that one reaches a Hillary Clinton-level of idiocy.
As for the article, Microsoft sucks and no one should buy their products, no matter what sort of technology they use to track online activities. I spit on Microsoft.
My guess (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that perhaps click through addds are a means to an end, in that they don't sell any product themselves but create awareness.
Once again tho, who are the people that actually buy something from a click through add, exempting porn of course, which everyone buys.
Just an exuse (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasted Effort (Score:5, Insightful)
To put it another way, if one ad is generating a lot more revenue than other ads, there's a reason for this. Whether it be placement, timing, appropriate context, better design, or whatever. If none of these things are the case, then I submit that the ads should all be generating equivalent revenue.
In short, Microsoft is developing a solution in search of a problem. Either that or it's just another attempt at tracking the consumer's every last act, hidden under a patina of equitable distribution of ad revenue.
Re:Wasted Effort (Score:5, Insightful)
This is in fact an issue we, as advertisers, have been dealing with for a long time. One ad does not sell a product or service, rather it takes multiple avenues to get a message across. If this tool helps up view thread within an ad campaign and at what points the campaign has different levels of impact, it would allow us to tune our ad-spend to a very granular level.
Things like Adwords is a large toilet that we used to flush money down. Anything that makes our $$$ go further we are all for.
Regards,
Re:Equal ads (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:New Marketing Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
Counter-productive (Score:4, Insightful)
1) I am already interested in that product
2) I would like to kick back a little money to the site I'm currently surfing. (I frequently have no other way of supporting them)
(OK, I also occasionally click on ads by accident -- especially those annoying ones that hover over the text and have really tiny "close" boxes)
If I'm no longer supporting the site I'm on by clicking an ad, then I lose all motivation to click on them. At that point, I start remembering how annoying ads are, and start considering an ad blocker.
Furthermore, it defeats the efforts of conscientious site hosters like Penny Arcade and Something*Positive (both webcomics, oddly) who are careful to only pick ads for products/sites they can support, and tailor the ads to be useful to their readers. As a result, I strongly suspect that their ads lead to more clicks and more purchases. A scheme like Microsoft's would add a whole lot of free-loaders to their hard work and make it no longer worth while (financially, anyway -- they still have their reputations, of course)
Re:People Who Buy Products Because They Saw A Bann (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know anyone who's ever been surfing a website, saw an ad for a gadget, or a shirt, or anything, and said "Wow, I just found out I need to buy that!"
Advertising doesn't really work like that. Much of advertising is just an attempt to create familiarity. So when you DO suddenly decide you "need to buy that!" you'll at least have a passing familiarity with the product that was advertised to you.
Re:Equal ads (Score:0, Insightful)
Counting clicks (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's occurred to me that this business about measuring an ad's value by counting clicks is BS.
The same marketers that think an ad is worthless because not enough people visited their page don't think that television or newspaper ads are worthless because not enough people snapped off the TV and called the company.
They get no feedback from TV or newspaper ads - other than a rough estimate of how many people viewed them. Yet from an Internet ad, they expect potential customers to drop what they're doing and rush to the company's website.
For instance, the ad at the top of this slashdot page right now says "A golden opportunity to make Java apps richer... click here". It includes a meaningless picture of some golden eggs. No mention of the company name, product name, or anything that might stick in our minds for later. From their perspective, either we click now or the ad was useless.
They'd never run that ad on TV or in the paper ("blah blah blah, call now."), then cancel their TV ad because nobody called. They'd include some company and product info, and hope we remember them.
So why do they expect so much more from Internet ads?
If you don't click on ads, then what? (Score:3, Insightful)
RS
Re:Just an exuse (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft ad model (Score:2, Insightful)
It sounds so Microsoft. They control the OS and the browser, so they could keep detailed history information about what you've been looking at. But they don't seem to actually be doing that. The Atlas Media Console [atlassolutions.com], which is what this is all about, is just a tool for managing multiple types of ads and reducing the data that comes back as they're viewed.
Microsoft has a point, though. "Advertising doesn't jerk, it pulls" - John Wanamaker. The ad that was clicked on may not have been the primary influence on the buying decision. For advertisers who have brands with some value, an online presence helps to market the brand. Then when an ad for something for a consumer actually wants is displayed, a sale is more likely. Advertisers can't currently measure that effect.
Many Google ads are, of course, from "bottom-feeders", with no brand of value. They just want the click-through. Anything that improves measurement of return on investment for the actual seller will reduce the value of all those "bottom feeder" ads - the "made for adwords" sites, the spam blogs, and such. It's unclear how much of Google's revenue is generated that way.
Some Google text ads have a form of mouse-over tracking. When you mouse over some Google text ads, nothing appears to happen, but in fact, some Javascript executes and the URL you can click on changes. I'm not yet sure just what they're sending back to the mothership, or if they send anything on mouse-overs without a click.
As for the bottom-feeder problem, we've recently developed some tools for SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] that tell us some things about Google AdWords. SiteTruth rates web site legitimacy, and we have a browser-plug in which displays those ratings alongside each ad. It's striking to see the difference between the quality of ads served on different sites. Slashdot and Linkedin advertisers aren't too bad; Myspace advertiser quality is very low. Remember that Slashdot article about the people who will click on anything? That's the Myspace crowd.
Re:New Marketing Strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost every computer sold comes with Windows. The deals OEMs make with Microsoft vary--Dell probably pays about $50 per copy. At millions of machines sold per month (239 million sales in 2006, estimated 264 million in 2007), it's going to add up. Then you start talking about the volume licensing that Microsoft does, and the copies that they sell off of the shelf (at much, much higher prices, but to an ever growing market of Mac users who want to virtualize) and I don't think that it's fair to call it just "leverage."
Re:Wasted Effort (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They get you subconciously (Score:3, Insightful)
You've posted the very incorrect raw material cost analogy. Raw material cost != actual cost to create: if I distill a CPU to just some bits of metal & silicon it's cost will be hardly anything. If I distill a skyscraper to just buying a quantity of raw concrete and metal, it's cost will be just a fraction of what it cost to put it up (we'll ignore the window drapes, elevators, etc). Is the value of Linux, BSD, etc "0" as there are no raw material costs? Redhat will gladly charge me $900 over three years just to be able to download binary patches from RHN (no support after 30days). There is *value* outside the raw materials that is there, unless developers really are worth "0" and should be paid accordingly.
You are using a false analogy, and it should die; please stop repeating it as it makes F/OSS people look bad, there obviously is a premium cost being added for some products but to imply that it should be the cost of just the raw materials is very incorrect.
What an awful way to track ads. (Score:3, Insightful)
People click on ad's displayed on a site mainly because of how the ad is displayed; mainly though good ad placement, or relevent content. Just because it was displayed on a half dozen other sites the person may have visited dosen't mean they should receive some of the payment. The fact that a user DIDN'T click on the ad on the other sites should infact punish the publishers as their ad's are aparently not specific to their customers visitiing the sites.
I can't disagree, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Take ads such as Diesel's: It's all in the branding, and they couldn't give a flying (expletive) if you visit their website; clients who do so only represent an infitismal persentage of their client base.
So, how to calculate "what and who makes a sale", and how to distribute the revenues fairly? Who placed the ad most prominently on their webpage (and to what effect), or who rigged their site to display the add next to relevent content (and to what effect?)? How far down the "ad chain" was that last click (and how are you going to calculate that - track and/or hunt down every movement of the person who clicked on an ad?)? They would have to build a database that logs the IP of each and every person who downloads an ad participating in their "system"`; I don't welcome the idea.