Don't Advertise in the Lawyer Section of the YellowPages
Kevin Salwen of Worthwhile Magazine shares this advertising nugget:
What ads get your attention online? Probably not what you think. A new study of online advertising by behavioral marketing firm Tacoda shows that people tend to look at ads if they are not contextually connected to the rest of the information. In other words, if you want your pizza ad to stand out, put it into a technology story, not a food piece.
First exposures to ads for cars, computers and TV displayed out of context generated 17% more looks than when those ads were shown on pages where the content related to the ads, the research showed. And after the first exposure--when consumers are expected to tune out ads--out-of-context ads generated a stunning 54% more looks than in-context ones.
Still paying for that full page ad in the “lawyer” section of the yellowpages?
Hmm, quite interesting research. I'm 100% sure that this doesnt apply to the most popular form of onine marketing; search engine marketing.
We have tried to run some campaigns for instance for a magazine about personal development and environmental issues, but the ROI was hard to keep at a decent level when advertising next to semi-unrelated search queries.
There must be a way to trick adsense into displaying unrelated ads, then you could test it yourself.
Hm and another thing, the views are not as important as the clicks. Too bad they don't report that. It could very well be that more peopole look at the ads, but less people click. Like "hey that looks odd... but uninteresting".
Oh and it seems the test group was 30 people in a mall, doesnt sound too statistically correct to me :)
Posted by: Ruben's marketing weblog | January 31, 2006 at 02:30 AM