Online video ads get more clicks than static ads

South Africa’s bandwidth premium is of course a significant obstacle to advertisers who would like to use more than the old static banners or animated gifs. Indeed local web surfers are likely to avoid or resent any imbedded ads that chew voraciously into their meagre bandwidth rations.

When Flash animation banners first started appearing a few years ago, they were contentious even in the USA, though the concern there was that such ads were slowing down the browsing experience rather than using up any allocated download quota. Delivery technologies have moved on, and typical download speeds in the US have lifted from being approximately what South Africans experience today to anywhere from 4 mbps to 45Mbps, and online video has come into its own. But is a video ad more effective than a conventional ad?

DoubleClick studied 2.7 billion online video ad impressions for 300 campaigns, comparing them with data for non-video ads, and concluded that video ads are significantly more powerful than most other formats. They found web surfers are twice as likely to click the “play” button in video ads as they are to click through standard static image ads, though they rarely watch the video more than two-thirds of the way through. Those clicking the “play” button typically watched 10 seconds of 15 second videos and 19 seconds of 30 second videos.

Obviously the lesson, as with most things on the web, is to front-load your message rather than building to a punch-line.

The actual click-through rate for video ads ranged from 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent, compared with click-through rates for static image ads of between 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent.

Of course it’s not just a numbers game – the quality of your creative is clearly important contributor to click-through rates, as is the relevance of the ad content to its positioning. And click-through rates themselves are irrelevant if your conversion rates let you down. But it seems clear that video ads online are finally starting to have an impact on brand awareness and traffic generation.

Online Advertising Spend Just Keeps on Growing

Global spending on internet advertising increased from $18.7 billion in 2005 to $24.9 billion (£12.6 billion) last year, according to ZenithOptimedia, the media-buying agency. Worldwide, the internet will overtake radio by next year and become the world’s fourth-largest advertising medium.

In the UK last year spending on online advertisements overtook spending on newspaper ads and, at 11.4% ad-spend share, reached just over half of TV ad spend.

And Google was second only to ITV in UK advertising revenue. According to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, UK online advertising expenditure jumped 41.2% to £2.01bn during the year, compared with £1.9bn spent on newspaper ads.

In the USA, Internet advertising revenues for 2006 reached $16.8 billion, a 34 percent increase over the previous record of $12.5 billion in 2005. Fourth-quarter revenue for 2006 totalled just under $4.8 billion, making that quarter the highest on record.

Google to provide a pay-per-action advertising model

In the past if you wanted to advertise using Google you went the pay-per-click (PPC) route, having Google place your ad either on its search results page in response to a search term you had bid on (the AdWords model), or on a web page in response to some context-relevant content on that page (the AdSense model).

In either case, you as an advertiser paid Google only if a web visitor actually clicked on your advertisement. If you wanted to place ads where you would pay the website publisher only if the clicker actually performed some action (such as buying something, subscribing, or providing information) you could use other services. Prominent among these pay-per-action (PPA) services are secondary search engines like Snap, PPA broker Turn, and affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare.

In March, Google announced that it was putting a pilot PPA product on the market. That’s huge news, because Google is such a dominant player in online advertising. The implications for advertisers are significant. A PPA model lets you pay only on successful conversion of the traffic that your ad sends to your site, instead of making you pay only for the clicks themselves. Many PPC ad clicks are of no value – the clicker made a mistake, was merely curious, or was deliberately fraudulent. Or your landing page and site structure were poorly designed and just got in the way of them doing business with you.

With PPA, you don’t pay for those clicks that go nowhere. But the sites hosting your ads expect something in return, namely a bigger payoff when they do deliver a visitor who actually becomes a customer.

Unlike with Google’s PPC product, where sites displaying the ads don’t get to choose the ads and are not allowed to encourage clicking those ads, sites displaying PPA ads are being given a lot more ability to both select the ads, or a basket of ads, and urge people to click. So expect much more traffic to sites, and correspondingly lower conversion rates – but higher ad ROIs.

Because a PPA payout depends on clear policing of what action (if any) was actually taken, it requires a system that can automatically monitor and verify those transactions. And because of this additional layer of technological complexity, PPA has not been widespread on the web. Till now. Google has the clout and the tech muscle to make this work, and work well, and the existing PPA players must be expecting their businesses to feel a great deal of pain once Google gets into full swing.

For small advertisers, Google’s PPA could be a boon, the equivalent of paying a small sales commission only on closed deals rather than their existing PPC approach which involves paying each time a visitor wanders in through their virtual doors.

Google is also testing ads that appear in text, similar to those currently run by Intellitext. These ads appear as words or phrases that have been double-underlined. Hovering a mouse cursor over those phrases pops up a small box containing the advertisement. As more and more online content is read through RSS feeds, the importance of in-text ads grows, so it is not surprising to see Google move into this space.

Major broadband speed increase only a year or two away

A great thing about the internet is the way consumer demand pushes suppliers to perform better, not only in the commercial arena, but also in the technological arena.

America’s network companies are under real pressure to enable what online customers want to do – and currently they want to access more and more video online. That puts a huge strain on existing bandwidth, with some analysts suggesting the internet may actually collapse under the load. If you are Telkom, your reaction to massive demand is to push up your prices and put a cap on bandwidth supply. If you are Alcatel-Lucent or Siemens, your reaction is to invest in ways to supply more bandwidth.

Since putting in new networks of fiber-optic cables is massively costly, researchers are trying to find ways to push more data through the existing infrastructure. And they are succeeding.

The current bandwidth target is 100 gigabits per second (Gbps). Siemens claimed this month that it has sent data at 111 gigabits per second over 10 channels on a single fiber over a distance of 2,400 kilometers. Bell Labs (part of Alcatel-Lucent) have just demonstrated that they can get the current 40 Gbps backbone (those long-distance data pipelines that connect cities together) to carry 100 Gbps. They are forecasting that, at least in America, video on demand is going to make up 90 percent of online data, and there will be a tenfold increase in the demand for bandwidth.

(If you think 100Gbps is impressive, Bell Labs also successfully transmitted data across 80km on a single fiberoptic strand at a speed of 25.6 terabits per second, which is like downloading more than 43 thousand music CDs in only one second…)

So, just as ADSL technology allows us to get relatively high speed data over existing phone lines, anyone in the world with access to existing fiber-optic networks should in the near future be able to get much better data rates through them.

Now if only Telkom can be persuaded to stop spending money acquiring other African phone companies and start investing in South African infrastructure, maybe we can start to catch up with 21st century economies.

Using buses to get rural areas online

At the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, rural villagers in India, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Paraguay with no landline connection to the web are getting online using a fleet of wi-fi equipped buses and motorcycles. The vehicles do the rounds, visiting each village several times a day, and connect with the local village computer(s) via an antenna.

It’s not real live internet – essentially the vehicles update their web databases in the city before going back out to share the updates with the villagers – but it brings them those aspects of the web that really matter. Villagers can request specific content, which is available on the next visit, a sort of time-shifted web surfing.


The founder of the United Villages initiative Amir Hassan told BBC News that in addition to delivering and collecting e-mails from the villages, the buses satisfy limited online interests, at least for now. "They want to know the cricket scores, they want to see the new Aishwarya Rai photos, and they want to hear a sample of the latest Bollywood tunes."

The system also enables e-commerce for products like fertiliser, pesticides, books and medicine. The wi-fi bus is used not only to facilitate the order, but to deliver the products.

Optimise your site with NOODP and NOYDIR metatags

Yahoo has just announced that it supports a new metatag, and it is a good idea to use it! When someone searches on Yahoo or Google, and a page on your site appears in the search results, the description that is displayed for your page may not be what you have coded for that page.

First, some very fundamental rules of website development:

1 – Every page of your website should have a description and a title. That’s not the heading that web visitors see on the page itself, but text that you insert within the title tag and the description metatag in the HTML code of each page. A lot of sites do not have these titles and descriptions, because the developer did not bother to insert them, or, if they exist, they are hastily created poor marketing copy. You can see these tags by opening each page in your browser and clicking View then PageSource, or Page then View Source, depending on your browser. Check yours today!

2 – Before you submit a new site to Google or Yahoo, you have to submit it to the major directories DMOZ and Yahoo Directory. The people who edit these directories make decisions about the classification of your site which Google and Yahoo and most other search engines build into their own review algorithms.

Now, back to the NOODP and NOYDIR metatags.

Your site’s descriptions may not be what you see in search engine results pages because Yahoo and Google spiders often defer to the descriptions that have been written by the human editors of those primary source directories, particularly DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) in the case of Google, and the Yahoo Directory in the case of Yahoo.

The discrepancy between what you think should be in the description and what actually appears may be because you have edited your page description subsequent to submitting it to one of the directories, or because the editors of the directory decided that they could produce a more accurate description, or – most likely – because at the time you submitted your page you did not have a description in place.

Now you can get around this problem by including a line of code on each page which tells the search engines to ignore the tags that the directories have, and override them with what your page code has in place.

The "NOODP" metatag is already supported by all major search engines, and it tells them to ignore the ODP (Open Directory Project, or DMOZ) tags. The new Yahoo “NOYDIR” metatag tells the Yahoo search engine to ignore the YDIR (or Yahoo Directory) metatags. To invoke these two overrides, simply add the following code between to the HEAD and /HEAD text of your web page code:

meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP, NOYDIR"
remembering to enclose the line between angle brackets<>

The only impact this will have will be to ensure that the descriptions and titles within your site code are displayed in search results rather than those logged in the directories. But it puts you in control of how your site is described!

Data Security Jargon

Some data security and privacy terms you need to know:

Social Engineering
The single most common source of data loss, social engineering describes an intrusion that uses human rather than technical interaction, and often involves fooling someone into breaking normal security procedures.

Shoulder Surfing
Shoulder surfing is the process of getting information by stealthy direct observation, such as looking over a person’s shoulder or eavesdropping on a conversation. Shoulder surfing is a common and effective technique to acquire personal information.

Dumpster Diving
Dumpster diving is the act of looking for value in someone else's garbage, an activity which is actually quite legal. In the contexts of computer security and personal privacy, dumpster diving is any technique used to retrieve discarded information that could be helpful in getting into a personal computer or network, or which could be used to steal an identity.

Post-it Peering
The act of finding usable sensitive data such as passwords by scanning someone’s personal notice board or the Post-It notes that they tend to stick around their desk.

You can visit Britefire’s online glossary of terms for an explanation of most internet and e-marketing expressions.