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.

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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

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