Ads are not tips…

Posted By Lon

Friday at 9:59AM EDT

No Comments

Tags:

advertising, clicks, lift, product, seth godin

Categories:

Ad Measurement & ROI, Best Practices, Online Marketing

An open e-mail to Seth Godin — I’m a big fan of his!

Seth,

I’m a big fan of your blog, following it for quite some time. And normally, you nail your topics, dead on accurate. Unfortunately not today (re: your post titled “Ads are the new online tip jar“). You’re not totally wrong (I say with great hubris)… just mostly.

There are basically two types of publishers in the ad universe: big guys and small guys. For the small guys, you are correct. Clicking their ads will tick up the numbers in their adsense statistics and the single blogger will feel good going to bed that night. And small guys are pretty important, particularly to long-tail focused players like Google (pre-DoubleClick). But the likelihood of a vast majority of the small guys receiving enough “tip clicks” to make an impact is low – no? Maybe… I’m not sure.

But, the big guys – well that’s a different story. The inflated clicks (from “tips”) will hurt their CTR and conversion numbers. And while in the end savvy advertisers mostly care about ROI, the truth is most big buyers spend their attention looking at CTR lift for brand campaigns and conversion lift for direct response. So random clicks, are not really a good thing.

I say all of this because at Linkstorm we focus on increasing clicks, lift, conversion, etc. – all of it. And that’s pretty hard. But we hear from our customers what’s important and focus on it.

Hope this helps…

Best,

- Lon