RE: ONLINE-ADS>> Average clickthrough rates

Randy Cosby (dcosby_at_infowest.com)
Wed, 18 Feb 1998 09:48:27 -0700

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I believe there is another reason for the dropping CTR. Offline viewing.

The newest versions of Internet Explorer allow a user to have the browser
automatically go out and download a "Favorites" page, or even a page and
all pages linked to it while the user is away. The browser will then alert
the user to any changes and allow him to browse the page offline if he
wishes. I don't know how extensive such use is, but it's definitely there.
Users who don't see ads won't click on them.

When Internet Explorer grabs these pages, it does comply to the "robots"
standard, and does grab the "robots.txt" file. See
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html for more
information about this file.

The useragent string for Internet Explorer when it is downloading pages for
offline viewing looks something like:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; MSIECrawler; Windows 95).

When a browser/robot grabs the robots.txt file on my sites, I log the
useragent and IP address to a database, and do not bother showing ads to
them for a time. I will publish the code I use to do this (written in
PHP/FI 2.0.1) soon.

How do other ad solutions take hits from robots into consideration? In the
past this wasn't much of an issue if the ad server counted actual banner
image downloads. Most search engine robots only download the HTML.
However, if the ad software only counted the HTML tag insertions, these
numbers could easily be inflated.

Randy Cosby
32bit.com / Devshed.com

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