5 Reasons Why Your Display Advertising Is Not Working

Are you one of those advertiser, who is struggling to understand why your Display Advertising is not providing the desired results?  If answer is yes, then this post is for you. Below are 4 most common reasons why your display advertising might not be working.

1. Ad Views: According to a study by Sticky,  77% of ads are never seen by people. Even when the ad is considered viewable, meaning it is within viewing area, only 55% ads are actually viewable. Which results in a very lower click through rate, the average banner CTR is about 0 .1% and declining.
2. Spider and Bot Ad Clicks:  Spider and bots, instead of humans, make up a significant amount of clicks on the ads. All these spiders do is click on an ad, land on your site and then leave causing millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks.  As a result you will either see a very high bounce rate on your pages and/or mismatch in the clicks reported by ad network and visits reported by your Web Analytics solution.  In 2012, a start-up reported that about 80% of their clicks from Facebook ads were by spiders. Another study found that 20% -90% of clicks on some sites were via spiders. I also showed an example of a bot in my post, 4 Reason Why Your Bounce Rate Might Be Wrong
3. Fat Finger: Over 35% of the ad clicks on Mobile are by accident, again causing high Bounce Rate.
4. Mismatched Landing Experience:  Make it a seamless and consistent experience from your banner to conversion. Users don’t have time so make it right the moment they land on your site. For example, If a banner ad promotes “Free Trial” then make sure landing page make it easy for user to sign up for the free trial. Don’t expect the users to click through to your site to find where the “Free Trail” page is.  Mismatched landing page and ad experience leads to High Bounce Rate and Low Conversion Rate.
5. Site Speed: Slow site speed breaks visitors flow from a display ad to your site. If it takes too long for the page to load then the visitor will be gone before she sees the full page.  In this case you will see a clicks but not visits and/or high bounce rate.

4 Reason Why Your Bounce Rate Might Be Wrong

Bounce Rate is generally defined as single page visits. These are the visits that leave the site without going any further than the landing page.  A very common approach to landing page analysis is to start with Bounce Rate and see if it is a problem before diving deeper into the page/site. However, the number that your tool is providing you might be wrong. Relying blindly on the number provide by your Web Analytics tool might lead you into the wrong direction. Below are 4 reasons why your Bounce Rate might be wrong

1. In Page Actions – If you have certain actions, such as video plays or windows that popup with JavaScript then the chances are that you are not tracking them as valid site interactions. In this case, even though the visitors will take one of the desired actions i.e. watch the video or click on a link to launch the popup window to fill a form etc., your Web Analytics tool will count these visits as single page visit, thus inflating your Bounce Rate.
2. External Links – If you have a lot of external links on you landing page e.g. “Like Us On Facebook”, “Buy this book on Amazon” etc. then you are purposely taking visitors out of your landing page but you might not be counting these clicks as valid site interactions thus inflating your Bounce Rate, as explained above.
3. Profile Configuration:  If you build a tracking profile of only select few pages on your site then any views of pages outside those select few are counted as “external links” (see above). For example, if you have 3 pages on your site, home.html, products.html, services.html but your profile only tracks home.html and products.html, then a click to services.html from any of these pages will be counted as an external link and hence counted as bounce if those were the only two page views that happened in the visit.
4. Spiders and Bots – For a long time Spiders and Bots were not a big issue for JavaScript based Web Analytics solutions, as very few spiders/bots executed JavaScript tags but now more and more of spiders/bots execute JavaScript thus inflating your visits counts. Many of these spiders only execute one page on the site, thus inflating your Bounce Rate as well.  Spiders and Bot seems to be an even bigger problem when major source of your traffic is Banner Advertising (Display Advertising) or Paid Search Ads.  See below for an example of a bot that might be messing up your Bounce Rate.

Now that you know that your Bounce Rate might be wrong, do your own calculations and come up with the right number before you start redesigning your Landing Page.  Recently, I came across a situation where all of the above applied. The Web Analytics tool reported that the landing page had over 90% bounce rate, after adjusting for above factors, we ended up in 50%+ range, which is still a little higher than industry average but not as bad as it initially looked (see average bounce rate).  A Bounce Rate of 50% calls for different analysis and actions than a Bounce Rate of 90%.

Read More Bounce Rate Posts

3 Tips for Expanding Tweet Reach and Engagement

Twitter feeds keep flowing with over 9000 tweets every second (Source: http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/). Unless your followers are constantly watching their twitter stream the chances are that your tweets will not be seen by a lot of them.  Below, I have listed three tips that will ensure that your tweets/content gets noticed and reaches most of your followers.

1. Tweet Same Content Multiple Times in a Day  – There are a lot of people like me who log into twitter few times a day (or after a gap of few days) and then and do a quick scan of timeline (or search).  They go back few hours in their twitter timeline and if your tweet did not happen to be in the timeline or searches at that time then they never see it.  Keeping this in mind, you need to tweet same content multiple times in a day to make sure your tweets are in the timelines of most of your followers when they login to twitter. In my post “Best Time to Tweet”, I suggested following timeline to tweet (this is just a suggestion and you should figure out your own timeline based on your followers and goals)
   1. Tweet at 9:00 AM PST (If all of your follower are in one time zone then tweet at 9:00 AM in your time zone).
   2. Tweet again the same message at 1:00 PST (4:00 EST) – (you might skip this if your followers are local.
   3. Tweet again the same message at 4:00 PST( If all of your follower are in one time zone then tweet at 4:00 PM in your time zone).
   In addition, I suggest adding another one later in the evening.
2. Tweet Same Content on Different Days – If you have content that is evergreen then it make sense to tweet it again. Just like above, it might take few tweets over few days/months to get your tweets noticed by your followers. Additionally, tweeting your content again after few days/months will put your content in front of your new followers and those who might have missed it previously.  However, going overboard with such strategy can potentially cause issues with some of you long time and ardent followers as they will see the same message over and over again. I use this strategy to tweet my old blog posts, which results in new retweets and followers. (I do it automatically- more on this in future).
3. Add Images to your Tweets – Late last year, Twitter started showing full images (instead of a link) in the timeline, just like Facebook does. A study (http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-power-of-twitters-new-expanded-images-and-how-to-make-the-most-of-it) showed that tweets with images got 150% more rewteets than tweets without images.  I suggest, you start including images in your tweets, when it make sense, and do your own tests to see how images affect the engagement with your tweets.

Follow me on twitter at @anilbatra