Is this girl Cute? -The New Low for Desparate Traffic and What works in Banner Ads
Guess the Advertiser?
This ad has been making the rounds on Facebook for quite some days now. Take a guess on the advertiser.
Try another
It is not a porn chat site or an adult friendship site. It is India’s biggest matrimonial site, Shaadi.com. Shocked?
There is no doubt that such ads work. Not for the brand but for the campaign manager. It allows the incompetent campaign manager to show that i got you so many clicks for so little money. They get you the clicks but does it fulfill your real target? Does it get some one to register? These ads don’t work in short term or in long term. They only give an illusion of doing so. Most of the times brand managers do not track anything beyond Cost Per Click or total traffic. Those are very favorable but that was not the campaign’s real aim. Ever bothered to check the bounce rate or cost per registration for such traffic?
Already, Facebook as an advertising platform does not work for advertisers, as it is the costliest (compared to Google Adwords and few Indian ad networks). The reason why Facebook is chosen is because it’s the new in thing for the fat advertisers. By placing such banner ads they believe their brand is now into the new world of social media marketing. The truth is, such ads are not even close to social media marketing, only that they are on a social network. And by allowing such sleazy ads, with no information about the landing page, Facebook will only lose credibility as an advertising platform.
Startups, never do this. You don’t have a brand positioning yet and this is certainly not the way to build it.
If you think Shaadi.com is Playing Akele (pun intended), well here’s one from Bharat Matrimony.
Seen this girl before?
The basic problem with this ad is that BharatMatrimony does not allow free chat as mentioned. But a bigger problem is that this pic has made the rounds before on chain mails as an Infosys employee. I am sure many of you must have seen it (NSFW). So I doubt if it is licensed. Thankfully BM is a little better for users, with atleast disclosing the site in the ad copy.
Are there ads that work better than these? How do you really make banner ads that work?
Data suggests the following as best practices in banner ads:
1. Use contrast colored background and text. Red and white work best. Such ads get high attention independent of the product. Blue does not work as it gets camouflaged with most sites. (Not sure how high attention is defined or measured but makes sense.)
2. Use flash even if the whole ad is static.
3. More than 3 key frames in flash ads perform lower. The attention span is not so long.
4. Auto replay works better than no replay in flash.
5. Ads with more information about the advertiser have least bounce rate but the least CTR also.
Hope this is of some help and will keep you away from making such desperate attempts. They can afford to do so but not you.
Got more info on the kind of ads that work? Please share.
Note: The post is based on official ad performance data provided by a campaign manager.
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the bharatmatrimony ad is not true. only their name was used but the ad was leading to some other dating site. i reported this to bharatmatrimony last week. hope they r planning some action against those ads by now. shaadi.com seems to have seen this ad and mislead by this assuming this is really a bharatmatrimony’s ad. cause, their ad is really going to shaadi.com page with NRI bride / groom registration page.
Mandar,
Are you sure the ads dont lead to BM. Because when i checked, a few weeks ago, the landing page was BM’s homepage.
arey forget about facebook and these ads…. BM, Shaadi n a lot more showcase a lot crap advertisements on rediff, yahoo pages and elsewhere.
These ads not only lower the trust of Indian parents over the online search processes, but also lower the standard of Indian web industry.
More than half of them says : kayastha for kayastha, brahmin for brahmin and all other sort of racist advertising. Offline media houses r no less handy in this scheme of the wretched.
Wow, really? This seems to be one of the most desperate strategies to have clicks anyhow!
The adv is not from bharatmatrimony and it was done by one of the affiliate of bharatmatrimony and the affiliate has been banned.
BharatMatrimony never encourages these kind of adv and it’s stands for trust and service.
“The basic problem with this ad is that BharatMatrimony does not allow free chat as mentioned.”
lol
LOL.
I didn’t mean it that way.
.
Just meant that it is misleading.
Please have a luk at this…
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Walkins & Off Campus
Date: Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 5:49 PM
Subject: Receive Marriage Proposals – Create your Matrimonial Profile in SimplyMarry.com
To: ..@gmail.com
Receive Marriage Proposals – Create your Matrimonial Profile Now
Click here to Register in SimplyMarry
R u Guys serious If you want porn go to a porn site. Dont search for porn on face book….. Having said that the ads look interesting where can i find them
Hey! @ShaadiDotCom on twitter clarified it. Its not them but a few of their affiliates who got it wrong. They had promised that it will be stopped and it has thankfully!
Could you please point to that tweet.
I don’t find any such clarification.
@jaggy: Yay! @ShaadiDotCom responds to http://is.gd/5jvr0 and says “the ads will be off soon. The affiliate has been asked to do so” #fb
1:47 AM Dec 11th, 2009 via web
Found it in @Shaadidotcom’s favorites
that is of December but the ad was still live as of 7th march. Lets wait for few days and see if they have really taken some action.
In that case it would prove my point about the campaign manager.
Hi Naman,
Our resident satirist has given her take on your article
http://www.techgoss.com/Story/2260S14-Sexy-girl-leads-to-Shaadi.aspx
This is nicely put up….There is a difference between getting a hit and asking somebody to register….Such ads target hits but not the end users…
Quite desparate indeed! I hate when online marketing is used as a source of only getting hits or getting junk traffic. This makes an end user lose trust in online advertisement. Where is the whole idea of targete
….Where is the whole idea of targeted and relevant advertisements?
I have a strong belief (intuition) that these shaadi/marriage websites are gonna run out of business in next couple of years. Marriage-after-love is quite deep rooted in the new growing generation.
And I really find college kids these days far maturer and adaptive than the ‘parenting generation’. In many other different ways too. And matrimony website guys, it’s just that they r totally confused between the ‘dating concept’ and ‘arranged marriages’ these days.
Speaks about the current social situation in our country. lol
Cheers,
Arvind
Thats the limit. But how does the marketing divisions of such companies go with such FAKE campaigns??
Its not serving any purpose..except a click