Click metrics... useful or not

What I got from the Advertising Age article is that click metrics do not prove if an online advertisement influences people's purchases or not. Many people do not click online advertisements. Just seeing an advertisement multiple times online could influence a purchase. ComScore found that online advertisements can increase 17% of retail store purchases and increase 40% of marketer's website visits. Also, advertisements through searches can influence a person's purchase. Steve Kerho found that online-display advertisments can affect conversions and search, and found that search ad's click-through rate increase 25%-30%.

In relation to my own browsing, click metrics would not be helpful. I do not click on display-online advertisements ever. Frankly, I do not really even pay attention to advertisements on websites. Most of the advertisements online are junk advertisements, such as shoot the monkey and win a free iPod. I usually know exactly what I'm searching for online. I'm not much of an online browser. I just go to the websites I check daily or purchase a product I planned ahead of time to buy.

I'm not sure which metrics are a better alternative. I'm not really sold that online display advertisements are really effective. Though, my opinion is biased because I don't look at advertisements online. If I had to choose, I would use advertisement impressions because a lot of people see advertisements online, but do not click on them. However, click throughs can be additional metrics used to measure advertisement effectiveness.

A Website Critique

I chose to compare Southern Illinois University Carbondale(SIUC) School of Journalism and Medill at Northwestern University (NWU).

Aesthetics
SIUC - The colors are all different shades of blue. It has a three column format navigation. You have to scroll down to see the entire page. This website has a very proffesional look, but I think medical when I see it.

NWU - Black and white are the main colors. They highlighted the website with neon colors. There is a flash picture slideshow of students and programs at NWU. It is a C format navigation. You can see the whole page without having to scroll down. Aesthetically it looks very modern and has an Apple iPod feel to it.

Navigation (Easy of use)
SIUC - I would say on a rating of 1 to 10 the website has about a 6 rating. The problem is there is so much text on the page it takes a while to riffle through it. Having to scrool down to find things also make the site complex.

NWU - It has pretty simplistic navigation. There isn't too much text. I would give this navigation a 9 rating.

Information quality and extent
SIUC - It has a lot of information, but finding it can be an issue. The main five topics are About, Academics, Jobs, News and People at top. Although, there is a lot more categories sporadically in the three columns.

NWU - There is a lot of information and it easy to find. The categories are Home, About Medill, Admissions, Journalism, Integrated Marketing Communication, Students, Student Work, Alumni, Faculty, Employment, Thought Leaders, Medill It, Medill Merchandise, Midell Cherubs, Northwestern University, and Qatar Campus. All the categories can basically be found in the left column.

Overall Verdict
SIUC - The site should be more simplistic, especially when it comes to navigation. Plus, there is far too much text on each page you visit, it's information overload. The colors also should relate more to their target audience, which are current students and prospective studnets. I feel that it gives off a medical look, when it is suppose to give off a journalism and advertising vibe.

NWU - I feel like it is directed perfectly to journalism and advertising students. The only suggestion I have is to have the site have more correlation to Northwestern. Maybe they should use more purple, since that is the school's color. Other than that, I really like this website.

Web addresses:
http://journal.siu.edu/
http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/

How does Google work?

Before I researched how Google works I thought I would give it a guess. My guess is that when you type in a keyword, the system searches for the most popular sites related to that keyword. Also, if a website pays for a premium spot, then it will come up as the number one or two spot. Advertisements related to the topic's keyword comes up on the right side.

A website called www.switchit.com says that Google uses PageRank to rank the pages that you searched. PageRank uses a ranking from 0-10 and then ranks your results by that. PageRank seems very plausable to me. Google actually has a page that describes how Google works, but when I went their website it was just a joke. The web address is http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html and it says Google trains pigeons to rank the websites. I thougt that was pretty clever.

Facebook Demographics

Five important points about the demographics of Facebook are:
1) There are more females on Facebook
2) A majority of Facebook users are 18-24
3) College students are the largest users, but many of the users' school status is unknown
4)There are more liberals using Facebook, but that data was no longer collected after October 2007
5) From 2007 to 2009, the unknowns of gender and age has lessened. About 98% of Facebook users' age and gender is known.

Knowing if one gender uses a social media more than the other is important to know because you can better target consumers with products that pertain to their gender. Knowing a majority of users are ages 18-24 and the second largest age group is 25-34 is also important. That means most of the users are in college or freshly graduated. This group is more mature, interested in technology, drink alcohol, etc. Advertisements are different for this age range. Also, Facebook having more knowledge of age and gender for a majority of their users is a great way to target advertising. Knowing specific age and gender will allow advertiser to send specific advertisements. For example: a female that is 25 years old can be targeted with Coach purse advertisements. Obviously advertising to a female that is 16 years old would be fruitless for Coach, because most 18 year old females could not afford a Coach purse. It would also not be resourceful to advertise to a male for a Coach purse because they are not the target audience.

In October 2007, a majority of users identified themself as liberals. Though, knowing users' political ideology is not the important information. The importance of this is after October 2007, that information was removed from the data. Maybe knowing users political stance does not have great impact on product use. On the other hand, knowing peoples' political stance helps figure out how to advertise social issues, such as promoting environmental issues.

Finally, most of Facebook user's are college students, but 57.6% of Facebook users education status is unknown. This large chunk of unknown users makes it hard to target consumers. People with college education tend to be reached in different form than people with only high school or less education. It is well known that educated people read more, and the reading materials educated people read is different than uneducated people. For Facebook, this issue of unknown education status may not be that important since most of the advertising is material things, but future advertisement adventures could be hurt by this.

At the bottom line, knowing the demographics and the changes within the demographics will influence how and who advertises on Facebook.