
The Incredible Click Rate of Nothing - DanielRibeiro
http://adage.com/article/digital/incredible-click-rate/236233/
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thenomad
I'm astonished at the low CTRs the "big" advertisers are satisfied with. Most
of the direct-response people I know (including me, although I'm a comparative
novice) tend to junk anything getting below 0.1% clickthrough rate out of
hand, and aim for .2% - .5% or higher.

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bgilroy26
I remember reading in passing something about companies being able to do funny
tax stuff with their advertising budget. Maybe that is the motivation?

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kposehn
It wouldn't surprise me.

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bgilroy26
I guess it doesn't count as "funny stuff", but all advertising expenses are
tax deductible.

<http://www.irs.gov/publications/p535/ch11.html> [ctrl-F "advertising
expenses"]

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wtracy
I would want to see how this stacks up with things like deliberately un-
interesting and generic ads that at a glance still look like a normal product,
or even ads designed to look like part of the page's background.

For all we know, they got a bunch of extra clicks just for looking different.
(Remember the story about the banner ad made in MS-paint?)

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praxulus
Half of them were just curious, according to the survey the ad linked to.

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angelbob
Which brings "mistaken" back down to the average CTR for an ad of that type,
instead of double the average.

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nl
They seem to have missed the most important thing about accidental clicks: the
position of the ad matters more than anything else.

If your ad is next to an important button you will get a higher CTR. If you
advertise on a site that gets a lot of mobile visitors _and_ your ad is next
to an important button you will get a very high CTR.

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joeld42
Quote from article: "When I want to make quick money on clicks," he said, "I
just buy late-night impressions on women's gaming sites. I guess the users are
tired. They click like crazy. I make a lot of money."

I don't know that much about online ads. How do you make money buying
"impressions" like this? How does this work?

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brandnewlow
Ad guy here:

So this guy is probably talking about affiliate marketing.

My best guess:

1\. He has access to lots of CPA (cost per action) offers from various CPA
networks. Example: "We'll pay you $3 for every person who fills out this info
request form about our product."

As an affiliate marketer, he's always hunting for offers where the payout
seems high or the offer seems attractive, basically an arbitrage mismatch.

2\. He has found some gaming offers that he thinks pay out pretty well and
convert nicely. Good landing pages, good product, etc.

3\. He buys ads on these womens gaming sites late at night because they are
click happy and the impressions cost less due to it being night time. This
sends people to the gaming site where they convert at a profitable rate.

Affiliate stuff is all about arbitrage.

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webjunkie
I'm curious: On which platforms can I buy links targeted to "late at night"?

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NiekvdMaas
Most DSPs offer so-called "time parting" functionality, where you set your ads
to run only during specific hours (and/or days). For example our product
<http://www.direct-ads.com/> or our competitor <http://rtb.sitescout.com/>
offer this.

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Scene_Cast2
That's neat. So, out of the people who took the survey, 1/2 were curious and
1/2 mis-clicked. How many even bothered to take the survey? What's neat is
that 0.08%, the reported CTR, is higher than on some regular ads.

~~~
dkokelley
I think the curious ones should be discounted. You would be surprised at how
tempting a vague ad might be to naturally curious humans. The 0.04% figure of
mistakes is interesting to me as 'background noise' for ad clicks.

This would probably be an interesting area for more academic research. How do
you measure accidental clicks? Do some non-ads receive higher accidental
clicks than others? What if it was a blank black ad? What if you mimicked
actual ads but with the 'why did you click' question? There are lots of ways
this phenomenon could be further explored, and I agree with the author that
for a multi-billion dollar industry this exploration is warranted.

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egypturnash
So a while back I wanted to make some ads for my web comic. I drew some
pictures of the female protagonists and made an animgif cycling between them,
because, well, sexy girls get clicks.

Then I looked at it without the text, and there was… something there.

So I did a poll on my blog as to which version people felt they'd click on.
Things were split very slightly in favor of the one with the text, but I
wasn't convinced. So I dumped 'em both into the same Project Wonderful
campaign, and told PW to do the thing it does where it displays them at
random, and starts changing the percentages based on which one gets more
click-through.

A couple days later, the one with the text was almost never being displayed.

Of course, if everyone starts doing this then eventually people will get sick
of ads with "important" information missing. Maybe I'm glad I got in before
the rush.

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joshkaufman
Ha - I used to work with Ted in my P&G digital analytics days. Nice to see him
shaking things up in this industry.

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mtgx
0.02-0.04%? That seems higher than Facebook's usual CTR of 0.015%. Maybe
Facebook should use blank ads, too, and see their ad revenue double overnight.

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alanfang
Where do you get that 0.015% is a usual CTR for FB? That's actually quite low,
even for them.

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mtgx
From 2 articles that appeared on HN a while ago, that tested Facebook
advertising campaigns.

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Tooluka
This experiment probably means this - most of the AD designs are Awful, with a
big letter "A". They are so bad that they actually decrease CTR of AD campaign
even compared to the blank rectangle image.

