Banners and Cheating

From: Daniel Wilson <danni_at_progressiveideas.org>
Date: Mon 15 Jan 2001 14:25:23 -0500

I feel that one of the largest problems with banners vs
other mediums is the fact there so easy to cheat.

I see happening so often and feel its partly to blame
for the decrease in results.

I run a small free webhosting provider for anime
related websites, and we had a major problem with
iframe cheats, mainly when it got so bad, webmasters
would team up and iframe each others sites. Result,
infinate looping iframes :X

During this time the CTR on our banner ads dropped
severely because people couldn't see the banners that
were being loaded. My solution, Anti-Frame code wrapped
on every page served. If the browser width is less than
50 and height is less than 50 then break and forward to
a nice warning page :)

Seams a bit severe i know, but like i said, were a free
hosting provider so we place ads on there page, there
making us commit fraud by allowing them to do such
things, at least thats what the banner networks would
say.

After inserting this code, our CTR went back up, above
the industry standards. In fact our most recent
advertiser saw a CTR of over 5% on a regular banner ad.

Maby if the banner networks incorporated such features
they would also eliminate the problem?

Another quick question if anyone knows the answer. Is
it true DoubleClick's Dart system scraps 1/3 the
impression count under the basis that 1/3 banners that
are shown are cheated?

Thanks for your time, and please respond back, im realy
interested on how other, more experienced, people feel
on this matter.

Daniel Wilson
Server Administrator & Head Programmer
Progressive Ideas

http://www.animeland.net
http://advertising.animeland.net





Received on Mon Jan 15 2001 - 13:25:23 CST