
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs - dohertyjf
http://andrewchen.co/the-law-of-shitty-clickthroughs/
======
flipp3r
I remember when I realized I'd become immune to banner ads.

I had to sign up for a college related thing on a website once and I just
could not see that sign up button. They made it a flashing advertisement sized
block right above another article, with big letters "SIGN UP HERE". A friend
sent me the link and I literally spent 5 minutes trying to find it in
navigation bars and other links in the article. My friend had to send me a
screenshot of his screen with a big red arrow pointing to the sign up block
before I noticed it. I now use Adblock but for the times that it doesn't work,
my mental Adblock seems to always help me out as well ( Especially for those
sneaky ads mixed in between real articles ).

~~~
icebraining
[http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2013/12/09/le-truc-quun-
codeur...](http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2013/12/09/le-truc-quun-codeur-sait-
reconnaitre-dinstinct/)

------
gabemart
I found it amusing that an article on this topic has a newsletter signup
dialog appear immediately upon scrolling down. I'm sure the effectiveness of
such a technique follows the same kind of curve as the other techniques
discussed in the article.

~~~
corobo
Commenting for this exact reason. If not for this article pointing out this
behaviour I'd have never noticed that I automatically closed it off. Didn't
even read what it wanted me to do

No doubt the next iteration is to change the functionality so that the 'x'
does something other than close the window, but we'll all learn to avoid that
too

~~~
jschwartzi
You mean you haven't seen the ads where you have to mouse over the X to select
"Close?"

I feel dirty having to look at the ad for the 3 seconds it takes me to figure
this out.

~~~
jgroszko
If it's not immediately apparent to me how to close it I get out dev tools and
start slapping "display: none;" on things. If that takes more than 30 seconds
I just give up and close the tab...

------
Kenji
"When HotWired showed banner ads for the first time in history, people clicked
just to check out the experience. Same for being the first web product to
email people invites to a website – it works for a while, until your customers
get used to the effect, and start ignoring it."

Well, duh, people tend to avoid unrewarding experiences. And advertisement is
basically the pursuit of pushing unrewarding experiences onto people. Of
course once they are onto you they won't fall for the tricks again. People
have just become much, much better at filtering now (both mentally and
digitally).

------
unics
I doubt we will see the sidebar ads disappear very soon though. Even though
our eyes do not focus on the ad we are still aware that the ad is there. There
are many studies concerning subliminal media being successful. In fact Derren
Brown made a career out of it.
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/6232801...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/6232801/Subliminal-advertising-really-does-work-claim-scientists.html)

~~~
hereonbusiness
We'll yeah, brand recognition/awareness, many companies are willing pay a lot
of money just to display some logo to a large audience.

Just think stadium sideline advertising.

We all have our heads filled with company/product logos, slogans, jingles,
etc. all this useless junk that just keeps piling on and on throughout our
life, insidiously altering our behavior.

Everything today, TV, Radio, Internet, Newspapers, public/private space,
Clothing, ... also doubles as an advertisement delivery pipeline.

I can't imagine using the internet without an ad-blocker anymore, it's already
such a different experience.

------
davemel37
All advertising today is arbitrage by definition -leveraging a discrepancy
between the value of those eyeballs and the cost to attract them. All
arbitrage will eventually be corrected by the market.

This is why there is such a strong push to content marketing, which is
essentially the brands becoming media companies.

This is also why native ad units (not just advertorials but any ad unit that
Is the atomic consumption unit of the site like news feed ads, AdWords ads,
etc...) Work much better than display, because they are value add and are
essentially the flip side of content marketing.

I think the future, sustainable strategies will be user experiences that
naturally progress into buying. (I.e. a content site selling premium content
or hosting a conference or a Saas product using a freemium model.)

Maybe ads are called ads because they should be adding value.

------
eli
Highway billboards have a 0% click through rate. Are they worthless?

~~~
nmrm
Yes. And ugly.

~~~
maroonblazer
>Yes.

The research[1] says otherwise.

<And ugly.

Subjective. I'd argue these[2] are anything but.

[1][http://www.arbitron.com/downloads/InCarStudy2009.pdf](http://www.arbitron.com/downloads/InCarStudy2009.pdf)

[2][http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/brilliant-creative-billboard-
ad...](http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/brilliant-creative-billboard-
advertisements/)

~~~
logfromblammo
If I am driving near my home, it will likely be to a business that I decided
to patronize before I even left home. Those in-town billboards are thus only
good for subconscious name recognition. I'm not going to hire an ambulance-
chaser lawyer unless I need one, but if I do, there are two in particular that
saturate the local ads around here, including the billboards. If you're in
that sort of business, you really do need to put your name on every space you
can buy.

On the highway, most of the billboard ads are for businesses positioned near
the highway.

I don't think highway billboards and in-town billboards are realistically in
the same advertising market, even if they have similar form factors.

Clever and eye-grabbing is strictly for in-town boards. The same people will
see this message multiple times, perhaps even twice a day.

Highway billboards have to be simple and informative, and highly relevant to
travelers. People may only see these once, ever.

When I'm on the highway, I won't even look at billboards unless one of the
following applies:

    
    
      - need food
      - need gas
      - need a toilet
    

And those functions are increasingly being replaced by GPS navigators with
preloaded points of interest and by smartphones' interactive map applications.

------
for_i_in_range
There's a bunch of issues with this post. He points out AT&T's one ad had a
78% CTR, and then labels HotWired's entire site CTR at 78% CTR (he assumes
that they didn't have other ads after ATT and that all their ads have a 78%
CTR)

And then he compares it to the FB CTR of 0.05%

0.05% is not accurate. It's likely what you'll hit if you have no idea what
you're doing, or just don't care because you're an agency advertising a
clueless big brand. But it's not that hard to hit a 1-3% CTR on FB now --
especially with the newsfeed ads. Even using standard IAB display it's not too
difficult to hit a 1-2% CTR.

Last, the 78% CTR is suspect. I wouldn't just believe it blindly. It does make
sense that it would be high (I.e. 20-30%) given that people weren't used to
banner ads at the time. Additionally, it's a Trick to Click ad that would
never be Approved today. And I've even tried out of curiosity, and it was
immediately slapped by reviewers ("I bet you can't click your mouse right
here")

~~~
jonnathanson
_" But it's not that hard to hit a 1-3% CTR on FB now -- especially with the
newsfeed ads."_

Facebook introduced newsfeed ads in 2012, and this article might (?) date from
as far back as 2011, going by the statistics and dates cited in it. I might be
wrong about that, but I do know it's an older article. Andrew doesn't date
these blog posts, but I remember reading this article years ago.

~~~
yeldarb
One of the nice things about Open Graph Protocol is that these sorts of things
are often in the article's metadata:

<meta property="article:published_time" content="2012-04-05T11:50:46+00:00" />

~~~
jonnathanson
Ok, good catch. :) I'll own up to the embarrassment I deserve right now.

Even still, the point stands: the article was published before newsfeed ads
debuted (in June '12), and certainly before their use became commonplace
enough to establish benchmark CTRs.

------
danuker
I uninstalled Facebook on my mobile phone because it buried my actual
notifications. I don't have the patience for disabling them.

~~~
rimantas
A single tap does not require much of the patience. Edit: ok, I will expand a
bit. At least on iOS an app using notifications asks for the permission. So a
single tap is all it needs to get zero notifications. Even if one allows
notifications first it only takes going to settings->notifications and
toggling a single switch there.

~~~
iokanuon
FYI, you can do the same in Android. Hold on the notification, click "App
Info", untick "Show Notifications". Or go to settings, "Applications", select
the app, untick "Show Notifications".

------
owly
How does this account for ad blocking usage? I'd bet the rise of ad blocking
SW correlates with the drop too.

~~~
fsaintjacques
I'd say the opposite, ad block correlates with higher CTR since you don't load
the ad.

~~~
panopticon
That would depend on the ad blocking implementation. Some only hide the
elements instead of preventing them from loading.

------
waylandsmithers
If anyone else remembers them, those banner ads where the cursor became a
swatter attempting to squash flies were the only ones I ever clicked on.

