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Text, a Friend

A large percentage of ad media spend in UK comes from text links. Paul Coggins, executive sales director of zanox UK, explains the UK's love affair with the written word.

A large percentage of ad media spend in UK comes from text links. Paul Coggins, executive sales director of zanox UK, explains the UK's love affair with the written word.

Broadband adoption around the world is booming - emerging markets in China and India are approaching with expanded use. Some countries, like South Korea are at nearly 90% of the population when it comes to broadband adoption. With a channel that's getting stronger by the day, online ad media has evolved too. What started as standard rectangular banners are still rectangular banners - except that video, interactivity and real-time product data is now important as well. There's ever-more pop-ups, pop-unders, exit sites and banners that expand over the website they're on, playing sound and offering mini games. The world's brands are competing to create the most engaging, entertaining and innovative web ads. However, the UK's web audience appears to be unimpressed.

Of the 80,600 links zanox currently hosts for advertisers around the world, almost 23,400 are text links and a large number are in the UK. The simple truth of ad media - as we've seen through seven years of forming publisher/advertiser relationships and monitoring the results around the world-every global market requires its own tailored approach to ad media.

There are some universal truths, however. It might seem surprising, for example, that some of the most expensive ad media online can't often be linked to ROI. The brand building campaigns that have appeared on YouTube have often been produced exclusively for the site. However, clicks onto the brand's website that results from a YouTube ad, not to mention acquisitions, can't be tracked back to the online campaign. Gorgeous, rich, new media does have its place in big brand-building campaigns for massive names. The splashy campaigns reinforce brand values and engage the consumer in a new way. Exclusive video and interactive ads are an ideal ad medium for getting attention. However, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) programmes and campaigns often benefit from simple, but very well-tailored text.

The reason for this is the nature of the Internet itself. People online don't see themselves as consumers and prefer practical information. They know what they're looking for and, more or less, how to find it. While big brands will easily distract surfers into their online presence with funky games and competitions - many smaller ecommerce brands simply have no good reason to prioritise ad media.

There are many ways to squeeze value from online ad spend before looking to designers and developers for cutting-edge ads. Online advertising needs to be about placement, relevance and honesty. Even when they're intrigued, surfers are hesitant to click on ads when they're unsure where they'll be going - after all - they'll be leaving behind the site they came to look at.

New technology combined with tried and tested marketing standards can help marketers ensure that ads are relevant and drive up acquisitions from campaigns. As always, targeting tightly segmented groups of audiences will be more cost-effective than casting a wide net. Finding websites where your audience is likely to go (or end up) and drilling down into those sites for ideal pages to place your ad makes a lot more sense for brands looking for online sales. Pages higher up in the pile are great for known brands who simply want to remind everyone about themselves. But when site visitors finally reach the information they seek - smaller brands' ads can find a better-segmented audience and still build a brand.

As the UK has found, using text links has other advantages than just saving on ad media. Links that co-exist with editorial copy on portals have been growing in popularity in our region. Placing text ad links into articles or blog entries can offer some very precise targeting and takes ad media outside the rectangular box - no graphic designers or game engineers required.

However, making sure that text links are as accurate and transparent as possible is crucial to their success. Spurred on by Google's algorithm for search rankings, text ads within editorial - where certain words in blogs and other text-heavy websites actually link to advertisers' websites annoy and sometimes deceive countless web surfers - as they click on links that they expect are related to the blog or article they're reading. A major reason for the increase in this tactic is its impact on Google ratings. This is because a text link from a high-traffic site is valued by Google's secretive algorithm as a sign of site popularity. Google compares the text in the link, the linking site and the site it links to when measuring credibility and, even if paid for, text links.

It's good that big, loud, splashy ad media does exist. After all, like TV commercials, online ads can entertain and amuse. We can laugh and be touched - and there's cultural value there. However, for driving acquisitions online, campaigns and ad media must focus on desired outcome and user experience first. Keeping ads relevant to local preferences, be it text in UK or the colour purple in China [in China, purple is the colour of the forbidden, while yellow indicates approval], honest and informative ad media placed on appropriate pages will always outperform creativity alone.