Standalone RSS Ads are better than Ads embeded in posts
Pamela Parker posted an article at Clickz about standalone ads in RSS. RSS Advertising is still new, it is implemented just by few Advertising companies, AdSense still offer it as a beta for few publishers only, YPN offer it also but US publishers only. But the expansion of usage of RSS keep advertising in feeds as a potential for advertisers to target more visitors.
RSS ads appearing as individual feed items generate a 7 percent click-through rate (CTR), over nine times higher than ads displayed within content posts. That's according to a new study released today by RSS ad firm Pheedo, which compiled the research based upon its network of 8,000 publishers.
The technique to use Ads as a single post in RSS is very interesting, because usually readers open a single feed and not entry by entry, this will make the ads more visible and have more chance to receive clicks. What I found interesting in the study is also the days where clicks increase, which are monday and saturday for normal ads, while for feeds another phenomena is observed Tuesday and Wednesday are peak days. After Wednesday, feed reading declines through the weekend. Readership on the weekends is 67 percent lower, on average, than through the week.
Pretty interesting specially that you can notice that peaks don't occur in the same day for website and feeds, which is good to make one compensate the other in the days where there is less clicks. Of course it's more interesting to use full post syndication with feed advertising, but what if you use ads in single post ? I don't see a real need to keep full posts and excerpts will work fine.
The only problem that I keep seeing in feed ads, is that they are still ugly compared to website ads, YPN generate them as image and their colors and fonts isn't that easy to make the blindness effect we can create on normal webpages. In addition, that putting ads under every post could make you see the same ads many times in a single page and this will be not only ugly but it won't encourage anybody to click.
