Forum Moderators: open
Once the study is complete, I plan to apply my findings to advertising on search engines.
So, a few questions -
1) What made you click on the subject line and read this thread?
2) After finding out that this thread has nothing to do with the subject line, are you going to read through the rest of my banter?
3) Will you be posting a REPLY to this thread? If NO, why?
4) If I adopt the same subject line at Pay per click search engines for ALL the keywords, will it help my CTR?
5) Assuming my website sells fresh bananas, will my PPC visitors buy stuff from me, after clicking on my ad?
3) Will you be posting a REPLY to this thread? If NO, why?
because ...
Craig
Interesting, intriguing, and merits moving from FOO to SEM
Sorry fellas.
If you're going to do a study that is generalizable, perhaps you'd like to remove the bias?
:o
Pendanticist.
All I wanted was to celebrate the International Laughing Day (which is TODAY, according to the news).
Now if you want me to be serious... I found the following ad in Google AdWords -
My Bankruptcy Story (TITLE)
I couldn't find his bankruptcy story on his site, clicked on the BACK button and obviously didn't buy anything from that site.
Well, who says humour has no place in marketing?
Anyway, just look how many folks already not only read this but actually replied?
-1- The exclamation point, and the subject matter itself, indicated that it was emotionally charged.
-2- The second sentence "What should I do?" asked advice
-3- The "reality TV" effect, for lack of a better term.
But, as pointed out above, would it convert? Maybe, given the right circumstances. I can see the Bankruptcy example pulling in a few that were trying to research their decision on the web.
<added>just saw the error message in the window burried deep below a lot of others: status: error : No Replies Allowed. This thread has been closed No Replies Allowed. This thread has been closed</added>
<added>Permission to remove granted ;)</added>
[edited by: andreasfriedrich at 5:40 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2003]
Sticky me her phone number. I want to congratulate her.
T
[edited by: toadhall at 5:41 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2003]
Must have posted while it was in the moving process. I didn't see but one from you when it landed here. Sorry for the mishap, though, happens every now and then.
1) Punch the Monkey and Win $1,000.
2) Your are 1,000,000 visitor. Click Here to claim your prize.
3) Your PC is slow. CLICK here to speed it up.
These type of ads are somewhat deceptive. And they did work during the good old days. Such traffic probably converted too. In internet marketing, it is okay to be a little deceptive.
<added> rushes off to copyright the "My girl friend ditched me!" title </added>
My "girl friend ditched me" works because it calls upon a common experience. However, what you do once you get them into your site is very important.
I imagine that something clever should do very well.
Puh-leeeeze! Don't remind me of that phase of the web's troubled commercial childhood.
I ran one of those Alert! banners for a client who wanted a fairly large run (1M impressions, as I recall). It was very simple, no animations, and the text on the banner was descriptive of the service being promoted. Basically, the hook was a big error-message dot with an exclamation point. CTR was 6 to 8%. Conversions, OTOH, were so poor that I agreed to pull the run at 500k impressions. But still, in the context of this thread, it's obvious that we do respond in knee-jerk fashion to many marketing ploys.
T
Craig
It is actually a fascinating topic as it relates to se's and clickability. What do people click on?
If this was the subject line in some spam email, I still would not have opened it!
Other answers:
2: Yes
3: Obviously
4: Not unless this is what I was searching for.
5: No, unless buying bananas was my original goal.
What do people click on?
People click on any ad/listing that -
1) Has a "good" call-to-action.
2) Has the word "FREE" inserted into the ad/listing
3) Is "different" from the rest of the listings (probably applicable only to PPC advertising)
Let me try to explain Point Number 3. When you search for a keyword like "web hosting" in PPCSEs, what do you generally see?
Ad Number 1 - Cheap webhosting. 150 MB. $3 per month only.
Ad Number 2 - Linux Host. 200 MB. $9 per month only.
Ad Number 3 - Free support. 100 MB. $4 per month.
.
.
and so on..
Most of the time, none of the ads actually STAND out. None of the ads have an unique ad copy. In such cases, you will probably notice "almost equal" CTR across the listings.
If you want to be noticed, if you want surfers to click on your ad/listing overlooking the others, you gotta be different.
hm..How can i tell you WHY i will not be replying in this thread - if i do this i would be replying!
I clicked on this thread to find out why it was in the 'SEM Research Topics' forum. I guess that means I was curious.
If this was the subject line in some spam email, I still would not have opened it!
Same here. In fact, if I had seen it while it was in Foo I probably wouldn't have bothered with it.
That it was in SEM Reseach Topics gave it some credibility.
So it appears to work both ways: seemingly context appropriate title leading to unexpected content, and unexpected title leading to ontopic content.
In internet marketing, it is okay to be a little deceptive.
Fake User Interface ads maker being taken to court
[webmasterworld.com...]
It wouldn't have worked if the thread had been left in Foo, if it had been initially posted somewhere else, or if the mods in here didn't generally do such a good job about making sure things are propperly categorized.
Had it been left in Foo, I would have ignored it unless I recognized the nick of the person who posted it. Had it been someplace else, I probably would have reported it to the forum moderators. The combination intruiged me.
I don't think the principle here is deceptive marketing in any form. It's not about promising or alluding to any offers that don't get fulfilled later on.
It's rather playing with the audience's expectations. A facinating little experiment, which really got me thinking.
Given that I just was finetuning an adwords campaign, basically going into a even more factual, focused direction (product, price etc), this is exactly the opposite approach.
But, while it was in Foo it sure got klicks...
Because it was out of context there as well.
<edit>It may be trying to pass as research, but it's still sounds awfully foo-ish to me!</edit>
