What Your Visitor Sees In Ads

A two year series of experiments on the psychology of advertising utilizing actual ads and created ads was performed to test:

1. the initial attention value of text matter as against cuts,
2. relevancy and irrelevancy of each to the article advertised,
3. the effects of repetition on each of these four elements,
4. different colors,
5. different sizes of type
6. different parts of the page.

By means of answers to four sets of artificial advertisements, in which each article was presented in six different kinds of advertisements, an effort was made to get at the reasons, which influence buyers in their choices. Any differences in the sexes were kept in view throughout. From the three figures and twenty tables, mostly taken on college juniors and seniors, there resulted the following conclusions:

Attention:

1. Best gained overall by relevant words or text matter, next by relevant and then irrelevant cuts, and least by irrelevant words.
   
2. Through five repetitions, the relevant words increased steadily in value, while the cuts decreased, and the irrelevant words remained on their initially low level.
   
3. The female observers were attracted proportionally more than the males by cuts and by irrelevancy.
   
4. In colors, males were attracted mostly by black and green, females by red and green.
   
5. A progressive increase of attention within the sizes of type from 2 to 5 mm. high.
   
6. The left side of the page was seen more than the right.
   
7. The horizontal quarter above the middle was overall more effective than the other quarters, with the bottom quarter decidedly least valuable.

Only about half our informants seemed to be influenced consciously by advertising, the females somewhat more so than the males. However, a considerable amount of advertising acts upon people below the threshold of their conscious attention and memories.

The reasons given for choosing one advertisement over others as the place from which to buy were:

1. Decidedly foremost from the age or reliability of the firm; then from cheapness, statement of qualities, with statement of prices and style least effective.
   
2. For last choice cheapness was by far the main reason, either directly or under the brand of “fake” while an unanalyzable distrust and suspicion from too great claims or details was next operative.

30 Day Challenge In Hindsight

Have you heard of the 30 Day Challenge? If not, it is a training session that is free that walks you through making money on the internet. Or so they claim. I faithfully went along with them on their journey this year and found that it is not toooo bad for a rank beginner or if you are looking at finding some new tools to use.

One tool they relied on is Word Press Direct. This is supposed to be a Search Engine Optimized blog. Now even tho it has some problems, if you know how to edit the templates you can make it work very well. The good thing about it is the auto posting where it pulls content from different sources to put on your blog. You choose. As is the case everywhere, templates may not be very good and so you either have to fix them yourself or go get one that works. This is a problem with the whole CSS world of templates. They break very easily. Also AdSense does not work on WPD for some reason. It displays ads but I never saw the impressions in my account at Google.

Now one thing about blogs, if you want to get the attention of Google, maybe using Google's blog (this one) would be the better choice. I think I will do a test and put my TDC blog onto Blogger and see what happens. In the meantime if you want to see my TDC blog it is http://salads.brighterplanet.org

Probably the most vexing thing about TDC (Thirty Day Challenge) is their insistance of no links except to some stupid social thingy. Okay, I can see wanting to limit affiliate links but they go overboard. Do like a lot of discussion boards are doing, put one board for people to post affiliate links to their heart's content. Put a time limit on how often they can post so they don't go crazy. Like once a day or week.

But here are a whole bunch of people trying to follow along and you can't put up a link to your project so others can see it and critique it (in a constructive way). To me, part of market research is testing your advertising etc BEFORE going big time with it. Having built websites and been involved in marketing them for a very long time, we ALWAYS had people come in and test the sites and make comments and critiques. These people were a mix of potential customers and just surfers. So by limiting people in the TDC to doing it on their own, there is a fantastic chance of failure.

Okay, enough for this post. I'll go into things the TDC people failed to talk about in my next post.