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I just got my latest statement from Sensei's with the number of times shown and clicked for my KGS ad. I got 52 clicks out of 42725 views. That's a hit rate of just over 0.1% - not very good! Now, admittedly my KGS ad isn't very well made, but I'd still hope to get more clicks than that. Maybe the problem is that most people here already know KGS and have no reason to click, maybe they aren't interested in it, I'm not sure.
But now for the point of all this: Arno, do you make public the overall click rates for all ads? If not, do any other advertisers care to share their click rates here? If mine are way below the average then I should probably work on a better ad, but if 0.1% is pretty typical then I have less reason to do so.
Bob McGuigan: Don't know whether I'm typical or not, but I rarely click on any ads on SL.
I think your guess is correct. Among people I know, more know about KGS than about SL already. I expect more traffic goes the other direction. If you don't already, you should advertise somewhere with more exposure at a place where people know less about Go, like Yahoo Games.
And your ad is boring. To get clicks from SL readers, your ad would have to offer something, like discounted KGS Plus memberships for people who register in the next week, or something like that.
I think the metric is flawed. You want to know the number of users not knowing about KGS taking the decision to click the ad.
In your calculation you are counting
The metric may not be perfect, but it is the industry standard one. Any time you look at internet ads, click rate is a key figure.
Again, I can see several reasons why my click rate is so low (primarity the poorly designed ad and the fact that most SL people know about KGS already), but I was curious about whether I could find out what the click rate is for SL overall, or for other ad campaigns, to find out how far off the typical click rates I am.
Click rate is no good for your ad though. I can't imagine that people who look at SL don't know about KGS by now. And you got the clicks from the 0.1% of the people who didn't.
Perhaps your ad should target the KGS+ membership? I imagine product awareness for KGS+ is somewhat less saturated than KGS itself.
Morten: We don't publish all the click rates anywhere, but, as you have seen, everyone gets a regular report.
Since the program started, we have seen 10,129,455 'pageviews' with 49,164 clicks giving an average rate of 0.49%.
From advertiser to advertiser, click rates vary considerably. Again, on a 'global' level, the best clickrate is 1.30%, whereas the KGS global clickrate of 0.15% represents the lowest rate we see. (sorry, Bill...)
Looking at the rates and the ads themselves and the services they provide, it seems that:
Another note: on a global level, the overall clickrate seems to be decreasing. On a quarterly basis from January 2005 ('launch' was in December 2004):
I have no clue how this compares to other 'ad servers'. Maybe someone who has the right background can interpret and explain this and suggest improvements (if deemed necessary).
On a general level: to the advertisers out there - do you want the clickrates published so that someone could analyse them or do you consider them 'private'?
[1] The individual ads 'priorities' are adjusted so that they will, all ads of the same advertiser put together, get the same number of pageviews as everyone else.
everyone gets a regular report
Did I miss something? Perhaps I have forgotten something to get reports and of course it would be very interesting to have some!
By the way, thanks a lot for the service. SL is linked back in Drago credit page, but I am afraid the number of visitors coming from there will be very low!
a) I'd say the majority of SL traffic is from "regulars".
b) As a regular, I only click on new ads generally. Once.
c) Most people who would be regulars at SL are likely well aware of KGS already.
d) There's not much point in worrying about it. You're trying to capture genuinely new people, which there are only going to be so many of each month.