metaViper

The biggest part of what makes Google’s Adwords and Adsense platforms successful is their unobtrusiveness. They’ve managed to present advertising alongside relevant content in a way that isn’t distracting, and has the real possibility of adding value (link farms aside). And that’s a basic tenet, businesses must add value to ethically exist.

But along comes Mr. Sponsor who isn’t getting the kind of conversion rates he wants from text ads. Maybe he’s seeing lots of pageviews but no clicks, or maybe his cost per click is sky high for the keywords he’s interested in. Rather than innovating his online brand through adding quality content or virally marketing, he chooses to research alternative advertising. Still wanting to target the online surfing community he stumbles upon voice advertising.

“Look!” Mr. Sponsor says during usability testing “he stopped what he was doing to click on our talking person, it’s already working!” What Mr. Sponsor doesn’t realize though? The tester was trying to figure out how to mute the talking advertisement so he could concentrate on the body text he was reading, and his heart is beating fast because his speakers were turned up loud.

Voice advertising can certainly play a role in selling goods and services online, but my recommendation is for it to come alive later in the exploration process when the visitor is looking for more detailed information. It’s a big faux pas to blast a visitor with your any blatant sales pitch in the first 3 seconds. That said, with the right timing voice advertising on the web can be very effective in creating more conversions. Make sure it adds value.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.