But then, i needed to. I needed to generate buzz, and get as much traffic to my website as possible! I needed to create awareness, like a billboard or banner at the mall, i needed to create awareness and draw in the mosquitos to the light to buy buy buy! So i got started with AdWords. It wasn’t till two weeks later, and close to $100 down, that i started to analyse the cost-benefit of this Google empowered tool. Now before you start thinking, “well this idiot just doesn’t know how to use AdWords right”, you’re far off the point on this one.

The ads simply weren’t performing. Sure there was traffic coming to the site, and very fast. My impressions to click ratio was pretty decent, considering i rarely click on ads while i do Google searches, or click on ads on a website. But then when i went to my log file analyser, awstats, it showed people would click, then bounce. Even down to looking at webserver log files in real time, some people would even just click on the ad, and wouldn’t even wait till any content displayed on the website, till they bounced. Now yes, the web-server didn’t crash.

So what does this all mean? Well i got thinking. In this deep state of thought i stumbled upon the idea, that due to Google AdWord’s nature of bidding on ad placement amongst fellow advertisers, people perceive the worth of online advertising to be way too high than it’s actually worth! The key difference, why you shouldn’t even begin to think that online advertising is equal or even more viable than offline traditional advertising media is purely because of the platform that online advertising media is on!

It’s online! It’s not in a shopping mall. No, believe it or not, people don’t go online, with their credit cards in hand, their budgets in mind, and browse the internet searching for things to splurge their money on. No. It’s a completely different shopping experience. People go around researching, checking out different options, they click, click and click.

But again, online isn’t a shopping mall. People are more prepared to spend money at a shopping mall, they are far easier to convert and to be persuaded, simply because they are prepared to spend money, before they even stepped through the doors of the mall, they are prepared to spend money. People online however are a much different breed. They could be just filling in time, accidently clicking on adverts that you are paying for, researching and never coming back, they could be interested but not have anywhere near the money you are after!

But how do you differentiate and target your prospective online users? Well you can’t to a degree. If i had an upper-market shoe-shop, i would put it in more wealthy areas. I would make the prices expensive, and the advertising to match the prices. I could immediately tell if the person had no money, or if they had a million dollars in their back pockets, as soon as they walk passed my store. Online? How does one tell if the person, of which you are paying for, who clicked on your advert has any money? Or if they have an intent on buying? You really don’t.

That’s why i feel paying so much for online advertising is so overly inflated, simply because the traditional marketing techniques and models are being applied to online marketing techniques. Who is benefiting from this? The people you are paying to have your links being falsely clicked. What can you do about it. Reduce your max bid to 50% below what you have set it to!

How does it all work you might ask? Well it’s rather straight forward! You enter your text/brand/slogan/whatevers, choose your size, then you get to pick your font and colour, whether its bold, italic and how the letters sit next to each other! Then you have a quick preview, add to your basket then checkout! Then you sip a cup of coffee and wait shortly for your creations to arrive in the mail!

Site I’m close to completing and releasing.
More news to come soon!

sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:

1. A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
2. A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.
3. If Flash isn’t installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you’ve designated as something you’d like “sIFRed”.
4. Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
5. Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits snugly inside the Flash movie.

This all happens in a split-second, so all of the checking, replacing, and scaling is not visible to the user. It is not uncommon to notice a very short delay as the Flash loads, but to the user, none of the internals of this process are exposed.

via Mike Davidson – sIFR.