Why FBX Isn't Getting Clicks

From CTR Pioneers Ren & Stimpy

File this one under the "Of Course" section... Facebook has chopped a dozen-odd companies from the public-facing section of its FBX partner list, while seemingly reallocating assets and focus to its more mobile-facing Website Custom Audiences project.

The astute reader will be shocked, shocked to learn that click-through rates for the FBX program have been "abysmal", with response rates diving down, down, down to the regions seen by, well, every other publisher providing space for every other static retargeting ad on every other Web site in every other country. 

If only we could find the magical advertising opportunity that consumers pay the same amount of attention to, year after year!

And the fact that CTR for FBX is following the exact same pattern that every other new online advertising rollout has followed, for the past 20+ years that online advertising has rolled out, shouldn't keep Charlie Brown from, this time for sure, kicking that football. 

The mobile screen is so personal! (Just like the laptop was in 2000.) The ads are going to be so limited and relevant! (Until the CTR goes down, and publishers squeeze more in, because the law of diminishing returns doesn't count, for, um, some reason. I guess. If you are feeling crude, this is where you can reference drug abuse.) Dynamic content ensures the user will care! (Unless the data is outdated, or misreading the consumer's actual intent, the way it has for declining CTR in remarketing ads since, well, remarketing was introduced. In 2006.)

Meanwhile in advertising mediums that don't provide enough data to be punished, Super Bowl ad rates remain ever-growing, outdoor and radio and print still exist in CPMs that aren't race to the bottom, and no one has to worry about the 30 to 50% viewability issue involved due to bots, malware and the like.

So what's a lead generation professional to do?

Well, if you're smart enough to learn from your mistakes, you try to stop caring about CTR, and care only about conversion. You accept that it's a losing game over time, but that there's money to be made in the right spots, with the right offer and creative. You keep your eyes and ears open for the next short-term boost, and react with measured acceptance when you can to things like new screens, or native. You remain skeptical to anyone's claims of boosting CTR, since that just opens up the door to a host of abuses.

And you wait, patiently or not, for better tools to make this increasingly primitive way of doing business to pass into the dustbin of history, and for people to get sophisticated enough to understand that clicks don't matter. Purchases do. 

And that there are a lot of different ways, beyond See Ad Click Ad, to get to purchase.

* * * * *

You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Speed Brainstorming: three techniques to jump start creative

A New Path

Trying to come up with new creative executions that move the needle is, of course, what direct marketing and creative pros do on a daily basis... but that doesn't mean it's easy, especially if you seem to have reached a performance plateau. Here's a few tactics that might come in handy when you need to revisit well-worn ground.

1) Individually visualize your target.

It's one thing to know your audience at a demographic level, but that rarely produces creative breakthroughs. So instead of thinking about what might work for, say, 18 to 34 year old men in urban markets who are interested in sports for an apparel play, name your guy. Put some touch points on a white board as to what music he listens to, what car he drives, where he went to school, the beer he drinks, what sites or books or magazines that he reads, the apps on his phone, and so on, and so on.

When you take a few minutes to put some flesh on the skeleton and to start thinking about people outside of the abstract, you will be in a much better position to do great work. By the way, taking this exercise to the extreme of decorating an entire room as the bedroom of your ideal target, then having brainstorming sessions in that room? That's what the very expensive agencies do. As a matter of routine practice.

2) Moments of charity.

I once had a project to develop tests against the control for short-term financial services in acquisition email. (Not the cleanest of consumer categories, admittedly, but sometimes you don't get to choose your clients.) The winning controls all looked like lottery or sweepstakes creative, with fans of cash and speed messaging making everything in the category look interchangeable.

From the client's demographic materials and feedback, we learned the true reasons why lenders went for the service, and they were far more responsible than you might gather from the art. So we made work that swapped in children receiving medical care, cars getting fixed, and happy families reuniting from the use of the service. The copy changed as well, and the project created new controls, with a promising new way to engage with the prospects.

The bigger point for me, from this exercise, was to have a moment of charity for why a prospect would engage with a service. Once again, it just led to better work.

3) Graphical relevance with visual innovation

When testing against a control, it's important to realize why the control is working. In an exercise with working in the life insurance vertical, research showed winning art across the category that showed families with young children. So the reason why the ads worked was fairly obvious, since you don't really think about life insurance, for the most part, until you have kids. Hence, why the controls all looked the same.

Our next move was to try pieces that, more or less, tried to reach the prospect at an earlier but still valid place in the buying cycle -- so, pushing a baby stroller, holding a newborn in a hospital, and so on, and so on. Once again, the exercise allowed us to exceed the control, and to also develop a wide range of creatives that gave us more room without succumbing to creative wearout.

* * * * * 

You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Online Ad Strategy for Busy Creative Pros: 3 Sites To Know

I Need This Button

I don't know about your experience and process, but for me, the art of making online ads has always been something of a rush -- literally.

Other disciplines may have time to come up with unique concepts, cast for models, select a director, check out different locales and photographers and the like.

In online, what usually happens is that you need to have this art by that date, or something bad is going to happen. (By the way, that date? Really would be better if it were three days sooner.) And with the explosion of formats for mobile and audience splits for behavioral targeting, the time to turn something new and distinct in creative isn't getting any slower.

But just because you are going fast and hoping to skip the usual and correct steps of branding and background documents, client meetings, demographic analysis, storyboard and mocks... doesn't mean you have to just take one blind shot and hope. Here are some shortcuts and moves that could make your next rush job a winner.

1) Learn more with Moat.

Moat.com is a bunch of different things. A New York City based start up, a purveyor of online research via the use of graphic "heat maps", and some really brilliant folks that I was fortunate enough to meet a long time ago. But what they really are, at least for online advertising creatives, is an absolute godsend for ideas in your category, and a massive time savings over less exact tools like Bing and Google Image.

What you'll find at Moat is a search engine based entirely around online ads. Type in a brand or company, and you will see ads in a chronologically based order, with forwardable URLs, with date and publisher site information for last impression seen. In a matter of minutes, you could be seeing what your competitors are doing with their online ads, on what publisher sites they have been running, and if the back history goes back some time, what they tried and are not trying any more. (That is a big clue, by the way. Right up there with checking out competitors in the same space, or brands and services that play to your client's demographics, but in another category.)

Is Moat perfect? Of course not. You can still find stray ads that they do not pick up on Bing or Google Image (especially with affiliate providers), and you will not see creative with personalized and dynamic elements. There is also nothing for email pros, which would be a real help, and you cannot click on the ads to see what a brand might have done on the landing page, either.

But for what Moat delivers and how much it costs to use (nada!), it just rocks. Every designer and sales pro that I've ever shown this site to have thanked me for it. Make it a routine part of your research.

2) Get competitive with Retail Me Not.

If you are working in an affiliate space or just curious to see if the offer terms you are getting as part of your campaign are truly the best, do a little digging on Retail Me Not. It's a consumer engine of offer codes, promo copy and sales information that's very extensive, and based on the URLs of the vendors.

When you use RMN in advance of a client call or as research for a placeholder offer, you are working with an offer that the client has approved and ran in the past. So there is no guesswork that the offer will seem out of left field, or seem overly generous or dangerous to margins. (You should still, of course, check it against the client's site, especially in case of holiday seasonality.) This also lets you get a sense of how aggressive the client has been in the past, and if different kinds of offers have been more commonly used.

By the way, there are plenty of other sites than RMN in the comparison shopping space. I just like it because it is very comprehensive, and has been doing this work for a long time. Nice way to save a few bucks when you are the actual consumer, too.

3) Dig into the demos with Quantcast.

This seems to work less than it used to, but you can frequently get an idea of the demographics of a web site by checking it out on Quantcast, an audience measurement tech company that's been around since 2006. Clues like the average age of the audience and the household income may help to influence decisions on font size, kerning, image choices and more... and there is also the increasing importance of mobile usage, which is another set of considerations.

* * * * * 

You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.