Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm doing some half-arsed research into online advertising. I wondered if some of you would be good enough to answer the following two questions:

1) Thinking only about the last six months have you bought goods or services directly as a result of an online advert (specifically any advert that is embedded in a website/webpage) you have seen?

2) Thinking only about the last six months have you bought goods or services directly as a result of a marketing email (such as from Amazon, eBay, Play etc.) you have received?

Ta.

1) No
2) No

Then again, I use adblock. And I normally know about good prices before newsletters go out.

1. No. I've been running Adblock for at least six months now so not seen any embedded ads.
2. Yup. Only this morning, the Ebuyer deal bargains thing I posted about in the Bargains thread led to me buying Wii Music and Smash Bros.

Bias sample. A survey of computer geeks.

no
Yes

Got a bit from play

1) I've bought things from their own websites - like if Dominos said "LOOK AT OUR NEW PIZZA" I might have bought it, but I was already at Dominos.co.uk . Otherwise, I don't think so
2) Yup.

1) I occasionally - very occasionally - click on sponsored links in Google, particularly if I'm looking for information about a specific product. I don't think I've actually bought anything as a direct result, and it's not quite the same as seeing a banner ad and going "ooh", either.
2) I don't think I have. Amazon are currently recommending me books on goat husbandry (I'm not even kidding) as the result of me looking at Radeon 5xxx series video cards, so I don't have a great deal of faith in their algorithms.

Because I've used Amazon to buy gifts more than stuff for myself, the recommendations are pretty much always stuff that other people would like which doesn't exactly entice me to spend more money.

Precisely

Ah ok then.

Also no & no.

Yes & Yes.

Not personally but for business you understand. I receive selective marketing emails that I know will have offers that might interest me.

Although I've told SVP to fuck off since they've dumbed down.

All sample is bias sample.

I used to follow them on Twitter for their offer updates but scrapped that once they put some daft bint in charge, who seemed intent on turning it into some pally chat thing.

In fact it was about 3 weeks after she took over the mailouts that I stopped them from mailing me. I also emailed them to tell them why.

I was spending about a grand a year with SVP, but much of my business now goes to Big Pockets and Big Maggot. There's only 1 item that SVP are the only stockists of that I need and I suspect they'll be dropping that as they move towards being just another box shifter.

They aren't the same company anymore. As they have moved from Devon to Scotland I assume the old owners just sold the name and stock and went on their way. Shame.

Definitely No
and Almost certainly No

Other than on this forum though. People should advertise here, it works remarkably well!

1) No

2) The occasional Amazon or Play bargain.

I'll take a dozen.

No and no for me.

No and no.

OK - no specific targetted marketting. I've received an email from Amazon declaring "70% off DVDs", been there, and bought something. Mostly because I always want DVDs, and I regularly shop at Amazon.

1) Sometimes I click on banner adverts if I'm interested in the product, don't think I've ever bought anything though.

2) If I've signed up to an email list, then I will often click on the links contained within, I almost certainly have bought stuff this way.

Malc

1) No
2) Yes. Although, I would really only look at "cheap DVD's at Play.com" emails. I don't think i've ever been emailed something that I thought "Yes. I would like to buy that and at that specific price point".

The place where I work spends a small fortune on banner ads to advertise their services and the actual return we get from them is minimal.. And that's probably being generous!

No
No - If you're going to fill my inbox with crap, I'm going to ignore it, and choose someone else who fills it with less crap.

No to the first.

No to the second, with the note that I recently checked my 'for fuckbag websites that force me to register personal details in order to use services I need, the cunts' email account, and found a pile of shit from lots of them that I explicitly specified I did not want them to send me. So, I'll be deleting those accounts and using ten minute mail with those companies from now on. Shits.

1) No, although I click on banner ads sometimes I am not one for impulse purchases.
2) No, they never seem to suggest anything that is interesting and if they did it would have to be something I was considering buying at the time.

Ignore these cunts and listen to ME. It's my job to create this advertising (among other things - making tea, handjobs, etc.) for a large travel website. Both of them work - and profitably as well. Sure, the more savvy the user the less likely they are to be drawn in, but speaking from lots of experience looking at actual stats and numbers, I can tell you with some certainty that an awful lot of people would answer yes to both questions.

edit: (Just to make sure everybody understands that the "cunts" comment was entirely serious.)

Are you allowed to discuss conversion and click-through rates?

Probably not, but what do you want to know?

What your conversion ratio and click-through percentages are

I should probably add that profitability depends entirely on how good you are, how much you're spending, what you're selling, etc. I'm not saying that all online advertising is profitable. Some of it is dogshit.

FOR EXAMPLE, we took out some banner ads with a newspaper website on a CPM basis rather than a CPC basis. It was something like a few hundred quid CPM. That's Cost Per Mille or cost per thousand impressions. It cost us about £800. Plenty of people (thousands) "saw" the advert, but we got around 15 clicks. If it were CPC (Cost Per Click), it would've probably cost us a few quid. Good on the newspaper site I suppose. So it depends - it's not all win-win. Some sites have savvy readers, some don't.

I'll see what I can do at the weekend. I'm doing the law thing during the week these days...

Oh Christ, don't go mad. I just wondered if you knew off the top of your head.

A couple of companies have told us that around 3% is a decent CTR for an ad. Unfortunately the first company we had in got nowhere near that (plus I've noticed he'd done stuff like invisible links from his own site to ours) but this new one seems to have a bit more about them and some of the ads are running up to 7% or so. Now I just need someone to provide me with some decent content for the ads to link to!

Oh, I've no doubt that there are some people who buy stuff because of them. I mean, enough people responded to those ridiculous MY GOOD FRIEND YOUR NAME IS RECOMMENDED TO ME AS TO BEING HONORABLE BY GRACE OF GOD PLEASE I AM THE NINETEENTH SON OF THE NOBLE CALIPH things for the scammers to keep sending them for years. It doesn't make them any less hateful.

HATEFUL, I SAY.

But yeah, this is probably a bad place to be polling.

Not always hateful...

No and yes for me.

That is awesome..

1) No.
2) Yes, but rarely.