Are Your Advertising Dollars Well Spent On Incentivized Traf

By Author: Valerie Tay
Total Articles: 3
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Are your advertising dollars well spent on incentivized traffic?
Valerie Tay © 2001 When it comes to incentivized traffic, advertisers or media
buyers are usually polarized into two distinct camps. They
either love it or hate it. If you've never heard of
"incentivized clicks", or "incentivized traffic", it means
traffic that is generated by rewarding users to click through on
ads. The basic premise of incentivized traffic is that members
of incentive sites are paid cash or other rewards for doing
things such as shopping, subscribing to newsletters, responding
to offers, and referring friends. The major incentive sites such as NetFlip, CoolSavings, and
Spedia collect all sorts of data on their members and are able
to target their advertisers' ads to the relevant niche markets.
This is one of the advantages that proponents of incentivized
advertising like to bring up. From the points that we accumulate when using our credit cards
to the stamps that we receive when buying a latte, incentive and
loyalty ...
... programs have for long been central to our lives.
Indeed, in the offline world, almost every marketer is using
some forms of incentive. Once online, incentives can work
wonder if we tie the proper incentive to the proper action. For
example, a merchant can't really lose out by paying a user some
cash through NetFlip to have her pay more cash to buy a product. Yet incentive-driven consumer actions are not as simple in all
environments. While critics concur that the use of incentive
can produce excellent marketing results for a pay-per-sale
program, it might be a flop in a pay-per-click or pay-per-lead
scenario. Incenting a user to click through or to take a lead
usually results in a less qualified visitor or member. For
instance, you may have purchased 1000 unique clicks to your
site. There is no deceit in the sense that the incentive site
actually sends 1000 of its members to click on your ad and visit
your site. But most incentivized users simply hit the "back"
button on their browser after your main page loads, so that they
can repeat the process with other ads to earn more points or
money. Very often, they do not bother to read your site's
content, or navigate deeper into your pages. In a pay-per-lead
environment, you may have paid for 100 people to sign up free
for the MLM program that you are promoting. The risk is that it
may turn out that the majority of these so-called new members
only sign up to receive the incentive and are uninterested in
your program. Hence, your advertising dollars would have been
spent for nothing. The use of incentive sites as a source of advertising comes down
to the axiom "caveat emptor" (buyer beware). Of course, there
are many advertisers, from the big corporation to the individual
home business owner, who successfully use incentivized traffic
to boost their sales. That said, one still has to be mindful of
the perils. There is reason enough to communicate with a sales
rep to discuss what exactly they are selling to you. Always
give yourself time to ask questions and think about the
suitability of a campaign before you end up with a purchase that
leaves your site out in the cold. *********************************************************
Valerie Tay is the Webmistress of AdHomeBase.com, an ezine co-op
that provides advertising in multiple ezines. Visit
http://track.ezinetactics.com/?id=ebooks-1528 to receive FREE
500 visits to your Website, grab a FREE copy of Val's eBusiness
Starter Kit (worth $200.85), and place your solo ads.
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