Traditional wisdom and countless studies show that FREQUENCY is a key measure of advertising effectiveness. Specifically regarding how many times an individual must be shown an advertisement before they are compelled into action. Figures vary widely from 6 to over 30 ad impressions required for maximum efficiency.
A logical conclusion would be that higher frequency will yield higher results. Furthermore, very low frequency (1-5 impressions) will yield very poor results.
Now lets look at some anaylitics from one of our paywalled sites:
definitions:
CTR = click through rate, percentage of users who click on an ad online
PPV = Pages read per visitor (basically, this is frequency)
CTR from subscribers (all pages)
0.51%
CTR from subscribers (paywall only pages)
2.87%
CTR from google (all non-direct traffic)
0.11%
PPV paywall pages
6.5 – 12
PPV google traffic
2.5
This is the logic behind my belief that traffic from google is almost useless to us. If google traffic RARELY exceeds the frequency required for advertising effectiveness, that traffic is truly useless to our advertisers.
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