fragmentate's Journal: Wasting Advertising Dollars

A disturbing trend is surfacing again in the world of "Online Advertising." Amateur "Online Advertising" agencies are trying to take it on as though it were television advertising. In other words, appearance is far more important than visibility. In this age, visibility means being found by the search engines.

Many advertising agencies have the know-how to handle television advertising by making ads appropriate for their clients. For example, you expect a much different commercial for an investment firm than for a beer company. Demographics are what it is all about; and that is based on the visual aspects of the ads. I won't go into a diatribe here about demographics and online marketing. Suffice it to say that the online market has thinner lines drawn between demographics.

The new trend -- which is actually an old trend coming alive again -- is to create completely visual sites without regard for the legible content. Sure, you can read it just fine. But to a search engine spider, it's invisible. So these micro-sites don't get indexed unless you just happen to find the words surrounding the link that leads to it. This is, of course, assuming it was linked to from some other site.

There are ways to keep a page visible to the spiders and still make a nice flashy site. These TV/Radio advertising agencies claim to also be online marketing specialists. But, having gone through their portfolios, they treat it just like TV -- a captive audience that is forced to watch ads. Unlike TV there aren't a limited number of channels to choose from. So, for people to find your "channel" people most often use search engines.

Here are some things to watch for from "online advertising" agencies:

• Navigation done wholly in JavaScript
• Fancy drop down menus done wholly in JavaScript
• Flash based content is not visible to engines
• JavaScript generated content is not visible to engines
• Non-descriptive titles, headers, and footers

Ask questions. Lots of questions. Ask them about each of the points above. If you get a sample of your site, right-click and "View Source...". If there is no textual content -- and I mean content, not HTML -- have them split out the flash files and embed some textual content describing what is on screen. Maybe next time, I'll go into how these sites aren't accessible to the visually impaired...

There are actually very, very few companies that know how to properly handle your online marketing campaigns. They know the right mix of graphical to textual content. They know how to give you the visibility you need. And, best of all, they know how to quantify the results.