Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Please click through properly

When I take the leap of clicking on an ad, I want to have the experience I am anticipating.

So apparently, the mylotto website will give me the thrill of the live draw (the live draw is thrilling?) right in front of my computer:
So, I'm a little curious about this. Is there some thrill I don't know about that I am missing out on? I want to be thrilled! Who doesn't? Hmm, what are you telling me pretty little flash ad? That I can check out said thrill online, to see if I want to experience it everyday? (I wasn't going to say everyday and then I remembered Keno.):
Fabulous. I'm going to click on you now and and see this demo:
Wait. Hang on. This is just giving me the option to play Powerball. Where is my demo? Where is my pretend thrill. WHY have you told me that I was going to click through to one thing and taken me somewhere else?

Seriously though, I spent a good 2-3 minutes trying to work out where this demo even is (and no, I don't count their 1-2-3 thing as a demo - and they certainly don't refer to it as a demo) and couldn't find it.

I took similar issue with a Steinlarger ad a while ago. I think this sort of thing is doing the online advertising industry an injustice (yes, it's Tuesday and I am being a bit dramatic). It's hard to get people to click on ads, you have to hit them in the right frame of mind at the right time with the right message. When some ads are not delivering to expectations, we are going to revert back to the days of mistrust with online advertising. "If I click on this am I going to accidentally download a virus?" Then who wins?

UPDATED: So, the very lovely digital planner for this campaign got in touch. Have to say, very quick off the mark and I'm impressed - more impressed that she was (in writing) quite nice about the post and explained the URLs which this campaign was meant to click through to. Once I clicked on those, it all made sense, however it would seem that the wrong clickURL's were loaded against the creative. This has now been rectified (if you want to check out the creative you can see it here - at the moment, may not be up in another week) and the creative is tracking through to the demo pages. Much better user experience, and it makes more sense.

Goes to show, don't assume that people will load exactly what you give them (so true when it comes to textlinks - from experience) own your creative, love your creative and once live, make sure it is working properly. Good user experience means everyone wins. Right?

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