We do quite a bit of online marketing for both our internal products as well as affiliate products. A common affiliate offer and online marketing product is “Cash for Gold”. You fill in a lead form and you are contacted by a gold liquidator. These offers are directed towards people who are in a cash crunch and need to liquidate their assets in order to survive. The worse the economy gets the better this offer will probably convert. Below are screen shots of the banner and landing page creative:

The above creatives are very very good. The landing page is very attractive with only a few fields to fill out and is somewhat generic. They truly emphasized “less is more” The banner creative is simple and to the point, but could probably use a more attractive female and the color scheme should match the landing page.

I was recently in Florida visiting some family and picking up a new convertible. My aunt and uncle have a few friends that are senior citizens and I was amazed at how many of them live month to month on social security and other fixed income cash flow; and boy do they love the race track. It was sad to see so many poor senior citizens at the race track gambling away their rent and food money. Anyhow, I was amazed to see how many of them had gold, diamonds, and other vintage jewelry that could probably be converted into cash. The company running the “cash to gold” offer is most likely Right Media/Yahoo and they get paid a CPA (cost per action) of probably $5 - $10 per lead filled out. I didn’t fill out the form, but I would imagine the user is immediately sent an email follow up and a phone call to close the deal. I think most people that mail in their gold are probably ripped off by the company and given an unfair price for their gold/valuables. If you try and dispute the amount given I would bet you have to pay for return shipping, handling, and insurance - which can be quite expensive.

It’s sad to see so many seniors, middle-class, and even poor people truly suffering from the recession the US is going through. I recently read a statistic that over 20 million Americans are using food stamps to help them eat. It’s even worse to see ruthless companies buying up their gold for pennies on the dollar.

The home page of any major website (AOL, Yahoo, eBay, MySpace, etc…) is a great place to do advertising and marketing research - as these are companies spending small fortunes trying to market their products or services. I recently came across Rozerem on the front page of Yahoo! Screen shots of the banners are below:

When displaying banner ads you only have a fraction of an actual second to attract a viewers eyes - otherwise Banner Blindness occurs and your banner is never seen. The above banners are very attractive, creative, but fail to get people to click. I don’t have the CTR numbers or the number of impressions Rozerem purchased on Yahoo (as this company is not a client of ours) - but I can determine from experience that the CTR is probably very very low, and Rozerem is not happy with the performance of their campaign. The very first image in a gif or flash banner should immediately get the users attention. In the example above you have to watch the banner ad for 6 seconds to find out what is being advertised. They did do a good job of including a call to action and that probably helps CTR - but it should be displayed in the beginning, not the end. If I were to have created the banners and the website for Rozerem we would have done the following:

• The banner would have included the words FREE, Sleeping Pills, Get a good nights sleep!, etc…
• The landing page would immediately gather visitor data by sending users to a lead gen form to receive free pills
• Instead of using boring images from old tv shows, we would have used images of attractive females in sexy silk lingerie sleeping peacefully and dreaming of a hunky boy toy

The current Rozerem website makes it too difficult for users to request a free trial of the sleeping pills. And once again, the banners are probably performing terribly and costing this pharmaceutical company an arm and a leg.