In my COMM 464 lecture on Search Advertisement, my professor mentioned an interesting fact: “Search Engine Optimization is 6 times more effective than banner ads”. I did some research about this to find out why this was the case and stumbled upon an article that compared the effectiveness of search advertising and banner ads.

Based on an experiment conducted by a major bank in the US which used both banner and search ads, it was concluded that search advertising is more effective in driving sales compared to banner ads. This was because search advertising could be directly measure in its contribution to user’s purchase decision. Moreover, banner ads pose the attribution problem, where it is hard to identify which ads attributed to customers’ decision to buy business’ product.

However, it is important to note that banner ads does play a role in improving the purchase funnel process. Banner ads can be seen as being on the top of the funnel which drives customers down towards the bottom of the funnel, that is the search ads. Thus is because customers who are researching about whether they should open a bank account with them tends to take more time in the research process. During this stage, they are more likely to go through several webpages over time that also serve the bank’s banner ads. The constant exposure to the bank’s ads help drive customers’ curiosity to start clicking on their search ads which then leads to customer purchase.

Thus, although banner ads may not seem to give as much ROI as search ads, I believe that there is still value in having them for certain cases. Banner ads seems more helpful in increasing brand awareness, especially for products or services that would require strong consideration by customers (e.g. luxury products, opening bank accounts). For these type of businesses, it would not hurt to try using the combination of banner ads and search ads to help further optimize the effectiveness of their online advertisements.

 

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/04/15/search-vs-display-advertising-which-promises-more-bang-for-the-buck/

I have recently been introduced to the world of digital advertising in my COMM 464 class. As I start to learn more about this field, I realize that the most optimum way to get the maximum benefit out of this platform is to take a Search Engine Marketing approach (SEM). SEM essentially means we should use both Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Advertising to enable our business’ website appear higher on the search engine result list and thus, more likely to be noticed by online users. Paid search advertising mainly uses the Pay per Click (PPC) or Cost per Click (CPC) model as a revenue model, which means that advertisers only need to pay when users click on their paid advertisement. However, a recent article I found suggests that we may have a new revenue model to consider, Cost per Hour.

 

This was started by the Financial Times who recently declared that they will start using this revenue model for their website’s online advertisement space. Apparently The Financial Times website visitors’ habit of reading their articles for long period of time means that they are exposed to less amount of online advertisement compared to users of other websites, which gives them a disadvantage in following the traditional CPC model as this translates to less advertisement clicks. To accommodate the unique nature of its visitors, The Financial Times proposed the CPH model so that advertisements on their website can be evaluated more fairly based on how long users are exposed to the ads on each webpage they stay on. Theoretically, I believe this would be a great fit to The Financial Times and other websites where users are less  likely to go to many webpages but more likely to stay longer on the webpages they visit, since customers are also more likely to remember ads when they are exposed to ads for long period of time. However, in practice, I think this model would not be able to replace the CPC model yet, as this model still brings a more certain measurement on ROI by having interested users take one step to confirm their interest in the ads (by clicking them). So, I would recommend news websites and other website with similar user habit to follow both CPC and CPH revenue model to maximize their advertisement space potential.

 

Source: http://adage.com/article/media/digital-advertising-ready-ditch-click/295143/

This September social media industry garnered much attention from the public by the introduction of Ello, which strongly advocates against the customer data selling model that Facebook does and promise to deliver a better alternative without having to ‘sell its users’.

I personally do not have an Ello account, so I have only been exposed to reviews from Ello users thus far. It’s important to note that Ello is still in its beta version, so there are still changes potentially to be made. So far, I am impressed by the unique way it projects an exclusivity vibe towards its user by only giving Ello accounts based on friends’ invite. However, this advantage will likely diminish once, if it does, Ello has many users. Although it is refreshing to see a social media page that’s much simpler and less cluttered than its competitors, there comes a point where users might not know how Ello is different from others (e.g. some say Ello focuses more heavily on images but it doesn’t seem to be as well managed as, Google+ per say). Also, the fact that it categorizes your news feed into ‘friends’ and ‘noise’ can be seen in two ways. It is nice to finally be able to only focus attention to updated from people who we care or interested in, but categorizing others as ‘noise’ makes it seem like Ello thinks that other types of relationships are useless.

In the end, although Ello does offer strong points that people look for from an alternative to Facebook, it still has a long way to go based on its lack in certain areas which most people can still forgive as it is still in its beta version. But if they don’t fix them soon, they hype generated in the past few weeks may soon leave them with much to be desired.

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/09/29/ello-is-no-facebook-killer/