Comments on: A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words http://www.conversionrater.com/2007/07/16/a-pictures-worth-a-thousand-words/ A discussion of ecommerce, online advertising, Web 2.0, web entrepreneurship, and just making the web convert for your goals. Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:27:54 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Mark McLaren http://www.conversionrater.com/2007/07/16/a-pictures-worth-a-thousand-words/comment-page-1/#comment-135152 Mark McLaren Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:49:51 +0000 http://www.conversionrater.com/index.php/2007/07/16/a-pictures-worth-a-thousand-words/#comment-135152 This is a great point, Pat. Web marketers and commentators tend to focus on the present and the immediate future, and from that perspective it almost looks like the online advertising world is made of text ads alone. But, like everything else about the Web, advertising is in its infancy. Working in marketing communications, I was sometimes amazed by the way ad agencies did their work. If they could sell an ad campaign or new product design to a client, that was often the end of the story as far as the success of the campaign or design was concerned. It was too hard to figure out the impact on sales relative to the budget. With web marketing, there are so many ways to track results, run A/B tests, make adjustments the same day and test again, and so on. This can help improve display ads just as much as text ads. Other factors that may boost the use of display ads are the recent lawsuit filed by the Australian Competition Commission against Google saying that Google fails to make a clear distinction between paid and 'natural' search results, and the steady decline in newspaper readership in the US, which could channel more money into online advertising. This is a great point, Pat. Web marketers and commentators tend to focus on the present and the immediate future, and from that perspective it almost looks like the online advertising world is made of text ads alone. But, like everything else about the Web, advertising is in its infancy.

Working in marketing communications, I was sometimes amazed by the way ad agencies did their work. If they could sell an ad campaign or new product design to a client, that was often the end of the story as far as the success of the campaign or design was concerned. It was too hard to figure out the impact on sales relative to the budget.

With web marketing, there are so many ways to track results, run A/B tests, make adjustments the same day and test again, and so on. This can help improve display ads just as much as text ads.

Other factors that may boost the use of display ads are the recent lawsuit filed by the Australian Competition Commission against Google saying that Google fails to make a clear distinction between paid and ‘natural’ search results, and the steady decline in newspaper readership in the US, which could channel more money into online advertising.

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