“Wiser About the WEB”
Barker, Stephen. “Wiser About the WEB: As companies get savvier about where to place their ads, there’s a flight to quality.” Business Week 27 March 2006: 54 – 58.
When marketers make any decisions for product (or service) advertisements, they most likely want to measure effectiveness before executing the Ads. A new medium, Internet, allows the marketers to obtain much more detailed information about consumer’s reactions before and after releasing the ads. Moreover, ads on the web have risen from $9.6 billions to $12.5 billons last year. How efficient it is! Net marketers, however, do not trust those detailed information due to the false clicks. Last past years, marketers simply measured how many consumers saw and clicked on the ads. This method allowed marketers to believe wrong predictions because click measurement could be abused. In fact, Google has reimbursed advertisers almost $90 billions for the matter of fraudulent clicks since 2002. It is also getting more difficult to obtain information about consumer behaviors from Internet advertising because the estimated 10% of Web surfers erase their Internet cookies on a regular basis.
What advertisers can do now is obviously to keep counting with existing methods. Meanwhile, they try to find new ways to acquire information, “such as age, Zip Code, and reading habits.” In order to get attentions from Web surfers, net advertisers basically need to build a combination of trust, high quality, and promotions. There is no doubt that the surfers regularly access a leading portal, such as Yahoo! or MSN. This means that banners on Yahoo! or MSN cost approximately $500,000 per day just like traditional advertisements. This illustrates that leading niche sites, blogs, and social network pages can take advantage of both price and attractiveness.
There are also a few sophisticated methods for tracking customer connection, such as “mouse meanderings, brain waves, following the buzz, dashboards, and etc.” Those new methods allows Internet advertisers to know which web page the surfers have come from even though it is still hard to obtain their identities; the surfers won’t give their information to advertisers easily. The goal for advertisers, however, is to get their messages in consumer’s mind and increase the responses based on the messages. In order to achieve their goal, new ways to measure effectiveness on Web ads will be introduced regularly.
In traditional advertisements, the ads reached consumers even though they did not want to involve any interactions with the ads: one-way communication. Today with a new medium, consumers are exploring on the Web and finding information whenever they want. Meanwhile, ads are on the Web just like what the consumers did in traditional advertisements: opposite meaning of one-way communication. As technology develops rapidly, the ways marketers advertise products and services are getting more complicated and typical approaches are not considerably used any more.
When Internet was introduced for public purposes, pop-up ads and banners were the best ways to advertise goods on the Web, and many net surfers saw and clicked the pop-up ads and banners. Even if the surfers did not click the banners, marketers thought that they should put the banners on the Internet because it increased brand awareness. It might work in the late 1990s, but there are too many net advertising on the Internet nowadays. This makes the surfers control pop-up ads, banners, and other techniques. Many surfers block pup-up windows so that pup-up ads on web sties cannot display any more. Moreover, some surfers do not even look at banners on web sites so that click rate is getting decreased; so new measurements are needed.
The article mentioned four sophisticated methods that can go beyond clicks as follows:
1. Mouse Meanderings: Rich banner ads changes as readers cross over them with their cursors. New technology can tell advertisers how long readers hover over each section of the ad- even if they never click.
2. Brain Waves: TACODA, an advertising technology company, is studying the eye movement and brain activity of 30 web surfers. The idea is to see which ads grab the views’ attentions.
3. Following the Buzz: Tech consultancies such as BuzzMetrics, Umbria, and Brandimensions are keeping tabs on blogs and social networks to evaluate the response to ad campaigns and product launches. They can target groups based on age, geography, and interests.
4. Dashboards: with new control monitors, advertising teams can check the performance of their online ads in real time. This permits them to tweak the content, mix, or placement day by day.
Those upgraded techniques help marketers to fill with lacks of uncertainty of advertisements on the Internet. As time goes by, however, those techniques may also have same problems that typical ads on the Internet have had. In order to avoid potential problems, it is necessary to create informational and highly personalized advertisements on the Web where they usually access regularly. Moreover, enhancing brand awareness is a significant factor for the web surfers to visit more frequently. Although Greg Stuart, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau in New York, said on the article
“There’s no relationship between clicks and brand awareness,”
one academic research conducted consumer decision making and concluded that brand awareness is a significant variable when they make a decision on the Internet for shipping even though they intend to purchase generic goods, such as books (Brynjolfsson and Smith, 2001).
This quantitative research described that the web surfers tend to purchase goods based on their brand recognition. Suppose that there is an Amazon banner on the right side on Google with other banners that also represent the same category. In this case, the web surfers usually click the Amazon banner. This means they more likely click any banners if they are aware of; right placements on the Internet with high brand awareness will provide the high click rate and will generate more sales opportunities.
In sum up, introducing new techniques are useful enough to help marketers to measure effectiveness. However, the marketers need to evaluate their brand awareness before advertising their goods on the Internet in order to increase productivity. Once the marketers know where their firms are in terms of branding, it will be much easier for them to find right placements on the Internet.