| See also:- |
article:- What's a Good
Click Rate for a Banner Ad?
article:- Aspects of Web
Advertising,
Press
Release FAQ's, news etc
on MarketingViews, |
When you
open a printed directory or magazine and find something which interests you,
then it's natural to forget all about the navigation tools such as the contents
page and instead flick through adjacent pages to find similar related
information.
When we added this feature to ACSL's portal in 1996, the
original intention was to provide an alternative method of navigation to readers
who had found a company profile or product page. In the years since then, on a
variety of sites, the navigation tools have been verbal links like:-
- browse - next file in this category
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or graphical links which
indicated the same concept such as these. |
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The benefit to
readers is that it saves them the time having to navigate up one level to a
directory page, before they can find very closely related information. In
analysing the actual navigation which readers take through our web sites, we
learned that the next page route is one of the highest probabilities they
choose.
You may think there's a conflict of interest here for a web
publisher running banner ads, if they minimise the number the pages which
readers have to navigate through to find what they want. Fortunately we put
these mechanisms into place on our web sites a few years before we even started
selling banner ads.
Then when we did start selling banner ads (in the
summer of 1998) and reviewed this navigation option, we decided that good
navigation was an important part of the reader experience which made people like
the site and refer it to others. So we kept it. This mechanism gives a good
experience to the reader, and improves stickiness. That's what you'd expect.
But you didn't come to this article to read about good site design did
you?
Using "browse - next profile" to help advertisers
In
directories like ours there are thousands of company profiles which are
segmented into categories like hardware manufacturers, software vendors, VARs
etc. In the first implementation of this feature, in 1996 we took the simplistic
approach of enabling the next profile link to click to the next company in an
alphabetically linked list. That enabled readers to start on any profile in the
directory and click their way through the whole list if they wanted to.
But
we soon changed that for 2 reasons.
- - most genuine readers find what they want after maybe as little as 2 to 3
profiles or related product pages. They don't need the feature of clicking
through the whole list.
.
- we wanted a method which was weighted towards advertisers. In a
typical market segment maybe 5% to 10% of the companies are advertisers. We
decided to change the navigation feature so that if a reader started on a
profile which was not an advertiser, then the next profile they clicked would
always be the next alphabetically listed advertiser (except in a few cases where
the leap of letters, such as going from P to A for example, would not seem
credible to an average reader).
In navigation terms, there are
typically 20 times as many links to an advertiser profile (from other
profiles) than there are to other company profiles. The effect is to maximise
the probability that in any navigation sequence through company profiles, a
reader will see a profile from an advertiser. Using this navigation method, it's
a certainty if they view as few as few as 2 files.
This is a win-win
situation for readers and advertisers. Readers win, because they don't have to
waste unnecessary navigation time, and the next page ALWAYS provides the kind of
information which they expect. Advertisers win, because they get above average
hit rates on their own pages.
In a future article in this series, I'll
reveal the most important ways that readers find manufacturers in a major
portal. End users navigate in a completely different way to sales and marketing
people like you... and understanding the differences is key to making your web
advertising work profitably.
browse a similar article |
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