Re: Ouch! - From 60% to 40%

From: Gerry Brady <erolands_at_powerup.com.au>
Date: Tue 23 Jan 2001 13:05:26 -0500

KEVIN FRAZIER <kfrazier_at_adace.com> WROTE:
> It is the way in which banners have been used that
> should be improved upon. Most users tune out banners
> because they usually do not match the site content or
> don't have any relevancy to the users needs.

I agree. In particular, geographic irrelevancy has
been the Norm for the Net so far and it has trained
viewers to Not click through. If you were in Paris
would you click on an ad for a business in the USA? And
if you sold Insurance in only 10 secondary US cities,
would you advertise on the Internet where almost all
your ads will be geographically wasted?

In three brisk short years we have seen Internet
marketers redefine the omens of a successful online
marketing campaign from a 3.0% click through rate, to a
0.3% click through rate, through to "clicks are not
important, it is impressions that count".

And the "targeting" strategy of "Let's show golfers
golf ads" has proved irrelevant too. Golfers spend MOST
of their money on things other than golf. And the BULK
of their funds (just like you and me) go to local
businesses in their city. And many of their purchases
are serendipitous .... This means they will buy a
holiday from the travel centre when they actually went
to the mall to buy a shirt.

In three short years Internet users as a whole, have
learnt that Internet ads in any form - interstitial,
superstitial, buttons, banners, you name it are all
irrelevant to them. For 1095 days, Internet users have
had this lesson drummed into them, day after day, after
day. Until finally every last one of them has learnt
the futility of clicking on an ad only to find that the
offering is irrelevant to them.

We run the geobutton City Targeted Ad Network
(currently over 1,600 sites) using unique technology
which determines the viewer's City in real time in 48%
of cases. Our geobutton technology dynamically inserts
the viewer's city name into the ad in real-time, which
accounts for 6 - 12 times industry standard click
through rates (rates vary across cities in different
parts of the globe). A default ad is shown if we cannot
locate the viewer's city with sufficient accuracy.

Our geographic targeting technology doesn't invade a
user's privacy with cookies, profiling or tracking and
we deliver true geographic targeting, not the pseudo
geo-targeting that attempts to geographically target
based on the location of the website. We target our ads
based on the actual location of the viewer. There is
very little geographic wastage because we keep our ads
geographically relevant to our users and we are
rewarded with those consistently high click through
rates.

Gerry Brady
geobytes, inc
http://www.geobutton.com/





Received on Tue Jan 23 2001 - 12:05:26 CST