Possibly The Best Way to Use Site-Targeted Adwords Campaigns

Boring Adsense ads can be seen on almost every site out there. It’s nowhere near as bad as those talking smiley face banners, but a lot of Adsense ads are mundane. Not all of them though…

Every so often you come across a really cool site-targeted Adwords campaign, sparking your interest and making you laugh. One of the ones I saw was from Advolcano, which is an advertising network similar to AdBrite and AdEngage, and the ad was on JohnChow.com.

See, John Chow had recently started displaying AdVolcano ads as a publisher, and AdVolcano took full advantage of that. If you’ve had any marketing classes, they tell you that a prospect must get your advertising message seven times before taking action. So Advolcano went to work! John Chow had blogged about the new ads, and you could clearly see the “Ads by AdVolcano” message on his site. But still, AdVolcano bought some ads to be displayed on JohnChow.com! (See the pic below.)

(Click the picture for a larger version.)

The ad just enhanced the powers of “celebrity endorsement” and “social proof,” the concept that if someone popular is doing something, you should do it too.

It may have worked well, but these days I don’t see any AdVolcano ads there. Perhaps AdVolcano got a good enough boost from that, but it could have backfired. One might wonder if John used the ads and ended up hating them, hence they are no longer on his site?

(Note: No worries, there are still plenty of good publishers listed at AdVolcano.com, including JohnChow.com, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re ready to pay for big traffic.)

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