Hover-over ads for dog food? Really?

[ManiacDan]

I mean come on people, don't lie, how often do you actually click on "relevant" ads anyway?

I've clicked ads on TheDailyWTF, Penny-Arcade, and even Facebook in the last couple weeks.  Relevant ads are more likely to be interesting to the person reading them.  I would never click a dog food ad on a technical site out of principle (and I spend $200/mo on dog food). 

 

Relevant ads are harder to tune out, that's why they work better.  A flashing banner demanding that single moms take advantage of obama's new insurance rules won't get clicked.  An ad for Zend might.  Plus, the relevant ads that are low key are less likely to be adblocked.  I installed adblock to combat the advertising on devshed when I was a moderator there generating dozens of posts a day.  That's because the ads there were interfering with how I was using the site.

 

UX is important, but I think relevance is just as important. 

[Philip]

I can understand how the dog food ads could be annoying but starting posts just bitching and not offering an alternative helps no one. So, in  a nut shell, either help come up with a solution or STFU as we try to keep this community online. Constructive criticism is welcome but hostility isn't. There is a big difference between reporting usability issues and just bitching about it.

And you really thought a full page ad was a good idea? Especially one that loads a movie and auto plays sound? Come on, you know better than that.

 

As far as ideas - why not do the obvious and reposition your current ads? Example, the bottom of posts you have 2 ads. IMO it's a waste because most people only read the first few posts, right?

 

Why doesn't this one use a leaderboard, or look more like a real post?

 

 

Finally, I agree with Nightslyr. If you want feedback or ideas, ask for it, but otherwise don't be too surprised if you're going to have people bitchin about things because random shit is thrown on the site.

FWIW, to me, this kind of thing ties directly with our little schism/pow-wow a month or so ago.  If you really mean that you want to re-engage the community and make it grow, then you need to communicate with your users in a way that's more meaningful than simply "Hi, welcome, please stay."  Alerting them of a change that may impact their viewing/posting habits is a good place to start.  Keep them/us in the overall loop.  No surprises, unless they're obviously beneficial to all.

[tomfmason]

I can understand how the dog food ads could be annoying but starting posts just bitching and not offering an alternative helps no one. So, in  a nut shell, either help come up with a solution or STFU as we try to keep this community online. Constructive criticism is welcome but hostility isn't. There is a big difference between reporting usability issues and just bitching about it.

And you really thought a full page ad was a good idea? Especially one that loads a movie and auto plays sound? Come on, you know better than that.

 

Well, to be honest, I had no idea that those ads were even put up. That was something that Eric was trying out.

 

My suggestion was to 1) reposition existing ads 2) attempt to find people interested in purchasing banners or text links(relevant hopefully) 3) use the more obtrusive type adverts for our organic search traffic instead of registered/logged in users.

 

[Philip]

Well, to be honest, I had no idea that those ads were even put up. That was something that Eric was trying out.

 

Fair enough. Sorry for accusing you then

 

2) attempt to find people interested in purchasing banners or text links(relevant hopefully)

I think you could do quite a bit off of this especially with affiliate marketing. Example: http://www.thinkgeek.com/affiliates/

[fenway]

Time to chime in here -- "testing" new ads on a live production site with absolutely no heads-up (to the community, not the staff, mind you) is simply bad for business.  Yes, I know the staff is privy to recent strife, but that's not my point.  We'd all like to see this community generate more revenue -- that's part of what the strife was related to -- and ads are just about the only way to do that.

 

I agree that non-registered visitors should be shown lots and lots of ads -- but relevant, unobtrusive ones can be shown the logged in users as well.  I find it really hard to believe that a billion-dollar industry can't deliver appropriate content.

 

If PHPFreaks is serious about trying this out, let's set up a private area when staff (and other such beta-testers) can provide feedback on just how broken things are when the ads are running, and take it from there.  Flipping switches on & off just strikes me as the wrong approach.

[tomfmason]

Time to chime in here -- "testing" new ads on a live production site with absolutely no heads-up (to the community, not the staff, mind you) is simply bad for business.  Yes, I know the staff is privy to recent strife, but that's not my point.  We'd all like to see this community generate more revenue -- that's part of what the strife was related to -- and ads are just about the only way to do that.

I completely agree with this.

 

I agree that non-registered visitors should be shown lots and lots of ads -- but relevant, unobtrusive ones can be shown the logged in users as well.  I find it really hard to believe that a billion-dollar industry can't deliver appropriate content.

I was thinking that we should actually focus more of our attention on the non-registered users. There are several fairly large forum sites that follow that same model and it appears to be successful. Although getting those guys to talk numbers is hard if not impossible.

 

Also, part of the reason for non relevant ads could be a feature within adwords called "remarketing" or something like that. Where people are shown ads relevant to their last search and or ads from advertisers that have flagged them as part of their "audience". This is one of the main reasons that we have been trying to find alternatives.

 

If PHPFreaks is serious about trying this out, let's set up a private area when staff (and other such beta-testers) can provide feedback on just how broken things are when the ads are running, and take it from there.  Flipping switches on & off just strikes me as the wrong approach.

 

Later today I will setup a private board and a new group "beta testers" for this.

[phpfreak]

Hi Everyone, thanks for your input.  There's a couple reasons why ads are tested live on the main site.

 

1) In order for most ads to work these days, especially adsense - the content has to be on a live site and it has to be able to be spidered by google's MediaBots to determine which ads to display. 

2) I don't have access to a public testing server where I can modify the ads and test them where google can spider them and determine the best ads

3) I don't really want to hack around too much in SMF right now (our forum software) because the software needs an update.

 

I've tried my best to leave the ad format where it's at.  I can't disclose how much google pays us, but it's nothing to rave about and frankly I'm disappointed that a site like this doesn't get relevant ads from Google or any other source. 

 

I'm doing the best I can over here, and until we find something that works, I will keep looking.  However, I'm only modifying the content inside the ad blocks that are already here.  The latest run with AdBrite wasn't paying very well either, and those were the takeover ads and the dog food ads.  Both which have been disabled and now we're back to adsense.

 

I can't ask you to click the banners, and I can't encourage you to check them out, so with that kind of limitation, Advertising is kind of a trick to get to work for your site.

 

It's a situation where I'm trying to find out what's best for the community and my only environment to really test it now is through the live server using the pre-defined ad blocks and SMF's Ad Management system.

 

As of right now, until something magical comes along, we're pretty much stuck with this form of advertising - less intrusive and less effective.  I will see what I can do to move some of the ad blocks around to be higher up in the posts and closer to what people are reading (Thanks Dan).

 

Have a good one everybody!

 

[Mchl]

Ad 2) How difficult would it be to set up non-public clone of the site? It could use same database, but have separate application files.

[phpfreak]

Ad 2) How difficult would it be to set up non-public clone of the site? It could use same database, but have separate application files.

 

It's possible to do so, but is it practical at this time?  As I said, the advertising programs need to spider the content they will be serving ads on and it's specific to the URL - this is how they keep track of which ads to display (until recently with Google's Remarketing). 

 

 

[fenway]

You don't need an entire site, just a page to which you can't navigate with knowledge of the exact URL -- Google won't care.