Behavioral Ads Better Than Contextual Ads

Written by Pablo Palatnik on September 13, 2007

A study conducted by Jupiter Research and commissioned by Revenue Science and AOL, shows “Online consumers are consistently more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual advertising - with behavioral targeting (BT) outperforming contextual by as much as 22% in some categories”

The study is so detailed I’ll post some of it here; great interesting study.

Two things to think about when placing ads on your website:

1) Ad Positioning – Where is it? Is it Eye Catching?
2) Ad Content – Is it Relevant? (Sometimes Irrelevant ads to the content work best!)

Key Findings From The Study:

*Overall, two-thirds of online users have taken actions as a result of viewing online ads.

*Across all advertising, 14% more online consumers are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual ads - 63% vs. 49% of the total audience.

* BT outperforms contextual advertising in terms of consumer attention by at least 10% across 14 major product categories, from Financial Services to Consumer Electronics to Pharmaceuticals to Fashion and Style. For example:
o 17% more online purchasers of computing products are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads.
o 18% more online auto purchasers are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads.
o 20% more online telecom purchasers are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual ads.
* Attention-getting behavioral targeting is preferable because more than 75% of online shoppers shop only once per month or less - and the majority research a product only once or twice before buying.

FireFox Becoming a Contextual Advertising Hazard?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on September 5, 2007

Looking at my analytics trend for the past couple of months, the Firefox browser has gained tremendous momentum vs. the explorer browser.

[Source: http://ff.asbjorn.it/pages/dlgraph.php]

Firefox has come out with a plugin called Adblock Plus. What does this do? Basically it will block out ads, and more importantly to many of us, block contextual advertising ads such as Adsense.

If the New York Times reports about AdBlock, than it has to have some meaning, atleast to the company it may affect most…Google.

“For now, however, the big players have decided to ignore the phenomenon. Neither Google nor CNN.com, for example, would comment on ad-blocking programs, which can also be added to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. (The Internet Explorer add-ons are not necessarily free and do not necessarily work as seamlessly as Adblock Plus working with the open-source Firefox browser.)

Wladimir Palant, developer of the open-source Adblock Plus project, wrote in an e-mail message that he had not heard anything from large companies like Google, because, he suspects, the program “isn’t popular enough yet. Attacking it would be a waste of time for these companies.” He estimated there were 2.5 million users of Adblock Plus around the world.

“The numbers are rising steadily,” he wrote, adding that his figures do not “show exponential growth any more (luckily, the server has limited traffic), but there are still 300,000 to 400,000 new users each month.”

Which Contextual Ads Work Best For You?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on August 21, 2007

My last blog post was about the Next Internet Millionaire reality online series that has just launched by Joel Comm. I saw Joel speak at the Affiliate Summit here in Miami about contextual ads and had a good presentation about the different networks who offer ads for publishers to place on their websites, blogs, etc and what works best. I wish I had the notes I took than to write in this blog post but unfortunately, I don’t.

Joel has great presentations on his YouTube channel and I think it’s worth watching every second. He is really a great speaker and exciting to listen to. He touches on arbitrage a bit on his presentation but that’s a whole other story. Wonder if he got banned from Google…I THINK NOT. He wrote a New York Times Best-Seller, “The Adsense Code”.

Now, from someone who has made so much money from adsense, you really have to wonder what they do in order to generate all this money since a lot of us just place ads and never satisfied with CTR’s, etc…and be like, “what the heck is going on here?…why aren’t people clicking?”

Many who start made for adsense sites don’t test enough (that’s usually the problem with most online marketing campaigns) and quit. I remember the one thing Joel said and maybe it’s because he made so much money with Adsense but people are and will click on things they are familiar with and trust. We’ve seen Google adsense on websites for years now.

Trying several different contextual ads, I have to say Google is in fact the best converting ad but there is one problem which people like Shoemoney and Darren Rowse point out…you don’t always want to place the ad in the same exact place if you have returning visitors because they can develop “ad blindness,” where they totally become immune to the ad and stop noticing it.

So which adsense ads work the best? I think a good strategy is not only to test for yourself but look at Joel’s blog (a.k.a. Dr. Adsense) and one of his sites or more and check out which ad units he uses.

www.joelcomm.com
www.wordsearchfun.com