Ellipses bad for <dot><dot><dot>

clickthroughs?

[berto]

Don't all the YPN ellipses look goofy? In the ad title link ... in the ad text ... in the URL ...

Is the idea to create intrigue, to leave the visitor hanging in suspense? "Want to know more? Tune in next click to find out!"

AFAIK, Adsense never uses ellipses. All ad title links, ad text, and URLs are complete. None of this ellipsis nonsense...

Might the overuse of ellipses contribute to low CTRs?

...

[Lex_Luther]

excuse my ignorance, but what are ellipses?

[jdMorgan]

Ellipsis [google.com]: [...]

Jim

[guru5571]

Superman's arch enemy uses ellipses all the time. So does Superman when Kryptonite is around. Got to... get out... must save... Lois...

[andrea99]

Pardon my intrepidity but why would anyone sitting at a keyboard online post a forum query for a word definition when these can be had instantly and more authoritatively from any of dozens of websites? I recommend answers.com but there are so many...

[garyr_h]

andrea, because humans are lazy.

I think the elipses do cause somewhat of a lower clickthrough, but I doubt it really matters all that much. I do remember Yahoo lowering the limit of characters, but I'm not sure if that was specifically for the Y! advertisers or for everything nor do I remember how long it would be until it is fully implimented.

Anyways, I think it's just poor adcopy all together. Most YPN advertisers read like a malfunctioning robot when many, atleast in my experience, much of Adsenses advertisers use more sentence type structure.

[wyweb]

Captain Kirk uses them pretty extensively too...

Scotty we... need more... power. We've got to... get out of... here...

I don't know whether it's hurt his CTR or not but I doubt.

[TammyJo]

That was my first issue with Yahoo... The reason being was the description text didn't make enough sense to draw "intrigue" it was kind of like:
"Buy the..." just not enough info. It seems that it has gotten better though, ad copy has improved!

[Lex_Luther]

You guys ... are funny

[andrea99]

Search engine result pages are riddled with elipses and the mark of a sloppy scraper is verbatim reproduction of search result pages.

The one scraper software program that I have examined, routinely removes elipses on the theory that this distingushes them from earlier, more primitive scrapers. It may...

[FTFlash]

I admit that when someone points out the elipses, they stand out as unecessary. However, I'm not sure if removing elipses would improve CTR or not.

And, there is no way to test the differences (unless Yahoo did a small beta test).