Re: ONLINE ADS>> ClickThrough Rate-Indication of sites quality?

From: R. Scott V. Paterson <rsvp_at_saabnet.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 17:03:21 -0500 (CDT)

SADIQ JAFFER WROTE:
>Hi, I was just looking at my advertisement stats and a
>thought hit me, could clickthrough rates be used as an
>indicator to a sites quality? Sites with gripping and
>high-quality information are likely to have much much lower
>clickthrough rates than a site with rubbish content. If you
>were reading through a webpage and saw an advertisement, you
>are more likely to click on it if the page content isn't
>gripping and high-quality. Any views on this?

I'm a lurker on this list, but I think Sadiq has a really
good point about users' behavior with web advertisting. I
believe that The Saab Network is the highest quality
content site for Saab owners on the Internet. So to make it
less of an inconvenience for browsers to click on ads, we
use the target="_blank" tag on almost all advertising on
the site. This leaves their current browser window on the
page they're reading and pops up a new window into which the
advertising info they've requested via a click is shown.
Once they are finished with this "tangential browse," they
simply close the window and return to the content at hand.
Users of our site are now 4x more comfortable clicking on
ads that might appeal to them, or so our stats before and
after seem to indicate. We do a lot of direct advertising
sales and our advertisers are very pleased with this
method. I've been wondering for a long time why other sites
haven't been doing this. There must be an obvious reason
that I have yet to stumble across...

-Scott

Scott Paterson
The Saab Network, on the Internet since 1988 - http://www.saabnet.com/
eScribe.com, Where personal interest and community knowledge meet -
http://www.eScribe.com

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Received on Wed Jul 14 1999 - 21:17:39 CDT