Probably the most important thing in advertising that has happened in a long long time and as a result google will probably become the largest display advertising player in short order. Google has added view through conversions to google adwords today. I’ve long used view throughs as click throughs are absolutely meaningless, even comscore says 8% of the population account for 85% of clicks in ad campaigns. I know my users spend 10′s of millions on other dating sites every month and now using view thoughs other dating sites can find out just how much they are really making advertising on plentyoffish.com When I advertise on other sites for every one person that clicks I get 5 to 15 times as many people going to a search engine typing in plentyoffish and finding it or just typing in the URL. At any rate our advertising inventory and all social networks inventory just got a lot more valuable.
October 1, 2009 at 6:54 am |
Markus,
I’m surprised to hear you say that view thrus are a valuable metric. Someone like you, who does hundreds of millions, if not billions of impressions through Adwords would have to be worried about the incredible rate of false positives. Click thru conversions in a 24 hour window – that’s a real, direct relationship between behavior and ad. View thru conversions 30 or even 60 days out? Not so much. You’re really just guessing and if you’re going to leave it to hunches, you’re in a totally different advertising strategy.
Where do you plan to cap your view thrus? Anyway, big fan.
Ryan
October 1, 2009 at 6:58 am |
Hey Markus
I wanted to let you know that I just finished- literally- reading your entire blog (all of the posts, many links, most of your individual comments). Took many long nights…but I finally finished it.
Throughout, I have been inspired to make various adjustments to one of my sites- a site that is, by pure coincidence, remarkably similar to your own (in a different, but not unrelated industry however).
I won’t bore you with the details, but I will say that you’ve helped point me in the “right” direction. Or perhaps better put, a direction I was already heading, but was only following by instinct. In a sense, your blog has been a fountain to a man dying of thirst =).
Anyway, I wanted to say thanks. Keep up the awesome work.
-Anthony
October 1, 2009 at 6:24 pm |
There is plenty of data to show that Display drives (lifts) Search (Organic and Paid), but I don’t think view-through is the right measurement by itself.
There are too many false-positives with a view-through. All it says is: “An ad was served on site X and later a person who went to site X visited your website in Z days.” You could buy ads on the bottom of the MSN homepage (which you need to scroll down to find) and claim that it drives clicks.
While I welcome any additional data point, I think what we need to do is to really test the correlation – run a statistical analysis (say Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient) and find out how strongly correlated an ad being displayed to navigation searches.
And of course, for better testing you can narrow this down geographically – run display only in CA, and monitor organic and paid traffic from from CA visitors.
October 1, 2009 at 8:22 pm |
This is a great new tool FOR GOOGLE STOCKHOLDERS…
October 2, 2009 at 2:29 am |
Sorry, I am a bit dense here: does this mean Google will charge a click fee even if there was no click, but within 30 days someone who viewed the page with your ad on it goes to your site? As Daniel R points out, how do you know they came back because of your ad?
October 2, 2009 at 10:07 am |
Sam,
I think Google wouldn’t dare charge extra for that. Just showing you hocus-pocus so you have even more reasons to advertise with them.
October 3, 2009 at 5:20 pm |
They don’t charge an extra fee they just show the overlap.
Most dating buys are huge and you can see impact right away. You can also use google analyitics and check out new users ratio of sites you are advertising on that click through to your site under traffic sources.
October 3, 2009 at 9:23 pm |
Thanks – I am clueless about this stuff – I have smart people working for me who do the actual thinking;-)
October 7, 2009 at 1:31 am |
Google is pure evil!
October 7, 2009 at 1:42 pm |
I think this tool will be useful if you are running severa display ad campaigns.
October 7, 2009 at 8:17 pm |
Markus, your ads arent displaying on POF (not when I search anyway). Heads up, mate.
October 8, 2009 at 4:37 pm |
Please check your inbox (mfrind@plentyoffish.com) as soon as possible. Thank you.
October 9, 2009 at 2:36 am |
@Paul
You can stop your own ads showing in your site:)
November 8, 2009 at 10:24 am |
It’s silly that this site advertises other personals websites.
CowPatty is a commie loser Gobel’s like minister of propaganda wanna-be!!!
January 13, 2010 at 10:51 pm |
Google is a ruthless money making machine!
April 30, 2010 at 11:18 am |
Hey Marcus what are you doing about the serial killer on your fish site that has been killing women. How is it that its not all over the place yet. Your system sucks and it can not stay free forever. You will be forced to charge a fee to stop these maniacs from killing again. I recommend a paid service. Marcus is only init for the money the ads provide for him. I have met marcus in person years back and he really needs to do something before he finds himself in a bad place.
September 7, 2011 at 8:54 am |
True, studies have shown that online display advertising has a positive impact on searches for the advertiser’s brand, direct visits to site and sales. We discuss this in more detail here: http://www.onlinemarketr.com/blog/403/view-through-conversions-fact-or-fiction/
October 30, 2011 at 4:11 pm |
hipismo…
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