Display the average CTR that banner & sidebar ads get on your advertising page

[ShayPunter]

Hello! I just wanted to make a very quick suggestion.

As a marketer, I like to know the approximate CTR (click-through rate) of any given website that I choose to advertise on, so it can help me make informed decisions to where I should be advertising on.

I think you should track the CTR of each sidebar and banner advertisements that get purchased, tracking the clicks, then averaging them out and displaying them on your advertising page, this would also be great with some more updated statistics and some client success stories to go along with this.

I know that certain advertisements will be more successful, but knowing the average click-through rate will allow for marketing managers such as myself to make a data-informed choice on what advertisement would be better (e.g. banner over sidebar), this also would, in turn, help bring more revenue to the site as people are able to make better informed choices. I think it's a win-win.

I am happy to provide more clarification should any of you need it

Hopefully, you can agree with my suggestion and I am happy to go into a healthy debate on it

 

[Justis]

Ads which are up for a short time generally receive a significantly higher CTR than ads which remain the same for long durations. A sidebar banner, for instance may receive even above 2% CTR in the span of a week, whereas if kept unchanged for many months, will likely average out to something around 0.09%.

The issue is, we’re a closed community. The majority of the people who view your ad and click it, will continue to view your ad many many times afterwards, but not click it, because they already have clicked it, and they know what’s at the other end of your banner, thus reducing your ad’s apparent CTR with every page refresh. In that sense, the more active each member of the community is, the lower the CTR percentage your banner will appear to have, regardless of if they click it.

One way to get a better measure of how effective your ad is, would be to only count each member as a single view. This way, if 100% of our members who have viewed your ad have clicked your ad, your CTR will be 100%, rather than an incredibly small number, because those same clickers have viewed your ad many many times since then. The problem with this is of course, if they click your ad again, that wouldn’t be counted. Moreover, it’s impossible to do this for viewers/clickers of your ad who are not logged into an MCM account.

I’m all for providing more information to our advertisers. I just want to ensure that information is useful rather than misleading.
Definitely open to hearing thoughts on how to handle this other than presenting every advertiser with an essay on how the information is tracked.

 

[ShayPunter]

Ads which are up for a short time generally receive a significantly higher CTR than ads which remain the same for long durations. A sidebar banner, for instance may receive even above 2% CTR in the span of a week, whereas if kept unchanged for many months, will likely average out to something around 0.09%.

The issue is, we’re a closed community. The majority of the people who view your ad and click it, will continue to view your ad many many times afterwards, but not click it, because they already have clicked it, and they know what’s at the other end of your banner, thus reducing your ad’s apparent CTR with every page refresh. In that sense, the more active each member of the community is, the lower the CTR percentage your banner will appear to have, regardless of if they click it.

One way to get a better measure of how effective your ad is, would be to only count each member as a single view. This way, if 100% of our members who have viewed your ad have clicked your ad, your CTR will be 100%, rather than an incredibly small number, because those same clickers have viewed your ad many many times since then. The problem with this is of course, if they click your ad again, that wouldn’t be counted. Moreover, it’s impossible to do this for viewers of your ad who are not logged into an MCM account.

I’m all for providing more information to our advertisers. I just want to ensure that information is useful rather than misleading.
Definitely open to hearing thoughts on how to handle this other than presenting every advertiser with an essay on how the information is tracked.

Thanks for the in-depth response Justis!

I do agree with you, and I overlooked that part, so thanks for pointing that out to me!

Since this is a closed community, short, to the point success stories would be a main go-to source (which there still doesn't appear to be any as of yet) for reliable information.

Another source of information that can be useful is monthly website visits, average visit duration and average pages per visit, and also countries where most of your audience comes from. I use a website called SimilarWeb to get estimates for this, perhaps verifying the information on there, then having it mentioned somewhere in the marketing page could help: https://www.similarweb.com/website/mc-market.org

Also, a second thought, it might be worthwhile to perhaps implement more targetted choices for advertisers to choose from (e.g. their ad only gets viewed by people in the US, or they can be viewed everywhere)

 

[Mick]

Ads which are up for a short time generally receive a significantly higher CTR than ads which remain the same for long durations. A sidebar banner, for instance may receive even above 2% CTR in the span of a week, whereas if kept unchanged for many months, will likely average out to something around 0.09%.

The issue is, we’re a closed community. The majority of the people who view your ad and click it, will continue to view your ad many many times afterwards, but not click it, because they already have clicked it, and they know what’s at the other end of your banner, thus reducing your ad’s apparent CTR with every page refresh. In that sense, the more active each member of the community is, the lower the CTR percentage your banner will appear to have, regardless of if they click it.

One way to get a better measure of how effective your ad is, would be to only count each member as a single view. This way, if 100% of our members who have viewed your ad have clicked your ad, your CTR will be 100%, rather than an incredibly small number, because those same clickers have viewed your ad many many times since then. The problem with this is of course, if they click your ad again, that wouldn’t be counted. Moreover, it’s impossible to do this for viewers/clickers of your ad who are not logged into an MCM account.

I’m all for providing more information to our advertisers. I just want to ensure that information is useful rather than misleading.
Definitely open to hearing thoughts on how to handle this other than presenting every advertiser with an essay on how the information is tracked.

Indeed. I'll move this to pending. We're planning on completely rebuilding our ads manager from the ground up in our migration to XF2 to better fit our needs, and with that I would really like for us to provide people with in-depth stats (at least better than our current ones).

Thanks for the suggestion