How NOT to do Online Advertising – Lessons from Rediff

Rediff seems to have taken a full leap from the standards of online advertising and web layouts when they realized that lots of people are going to click on day 1 scorecard link for IND-AUS first test match. The result is nothing short of user disgust and anger. See it for yourself.

There seem to be at least 5 ads on the page, not one is relevant, clearly visible or useful. Its a shame to see such lousy execution from one of the India’s premier portals. I could think of atleast 5 ways to improve the ad performance in this case,

1. Set the page layout straight. Instead of surrounding the content with ads mindlessly, They could have one ad on the top, one on bottom and may be just another one on the side.
2. Set the correct keywords for the page. Who would display a car/auto ad on a cricket score page. If the keywords are any better we would be seeing ads related to sporting magazine subscriptions, dish tv, software for live score on mobile / desktop, sports t-shirts, mugs etc. But all we see here is an ad trying to sell mobile phone, car and TOEFL.
3. Include comments / discussion feature on the page. Comments are rich source to identify new adwords to display relevant ads. Instead of assuming that everyone visiting the page is interested in cars or English exams or post graduation courses, Rediff can actually look up the profiles of users commenting and then display correct ads for them.
4. If they must display the car ad, rediff can make them sponsor the page. That way user would feel that the ad is still relevant and would be provoked to explore what is on offer.
5. Use the browser history to effectively market what the advertisers have to sell. Mine keywords from the browsing history and then display ads related to them.

What do you think?

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