Online advertising in a soup - PPC

There are several online advertising agencies which serves advertisements on web sites. And the advertiser is charged for clicks being made on the ad, out of the amount charged a portion of it is given to the web site owner displaying those ads. More commonly know as concept of PPC (Pay Per Click).

Few smart pants have came up with a new way to fool around with online advertising agency. That is by giving away direct contact details which would not require clicking the ad. Like in the banner ad as displayed below the company is asking the viewer to send an SMS to them, the viewer will almost never click the advertisement. Leaving the advertisement agency and the web site displaying the ad been misused.

On the another hand the company who is interested in generating leads for their business is getting quality leads as the viewer will be spending money to send SMS and is more likely to be serious. At the same time also saving money as rarely there will be clicks on the advertisement which they are displaying on Internet.

Quite possibly due to advertising agency policies the advertiser had to add a text "To know more click here". But in the banner below which is exactly the size as it appeared, one can never make out its written at bottom right corner without using a magnifying lens. It seems more like "Terms and conditions apply".

For big companies if they are concerned of tracking the source of leads been generated then they might use a different channel for example a different number where the requests will be received.

Now the concern over here here is less about not getting paid for the advertisements but about displaying them for free. More importantly how online advertising industry is going to deal with such problems.

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PS: Explanation for such situations is requested from Google with ticket# 228394073

Orkut Beta Scrapbook Ajax BUG

imageOrkut in its initial days used to give several exceptions or errors now and then, which has really improved over the course of time. Being Orkut in beta version, few errors in a long lost while are quite acceptable. But shouldn’t Orkut be concentrating on making things more stable before adding more new features, provided that the new feature have improved user experience a lot.

Orkut uses Ajax very extensively even for places where it may be avoided, this is quite different from other Google services. For example when sending a scrap to someone on Orkut, first it is send using an Ajax request and then the page is reloaded. Its hard to make out the reason or purpose for this approach. But this makes sense entirely when replying to a scraps received by clicking the reply link which expands a form below the scrap and goes away after the scrap is send without reloading page.

Now a real dead end situation is when an exception or error takes place while processing an Ajax request. To surprise Orkut seems like not to be handling exceptions or errors which takes place while processing an Ajax request. User will keep pressing the post scrap button again and again as nothing happens but no message is shown, leaving the end user clue less of what happened.

This problem cannot be diagnosed unless special tools are used to study the Ajax requests and their response. After using a very popular tool used by web developers called Firebug for Firefox, failed Ajax requests can be seen very clearly.

orkut_exception_firebug_console
Ajax response on exception or error

 

On further investigating the issue, the response received was in HTML which looked like in the image above and the message contained was:

We did not understand your last request. Please go back and try again. You may also need to re-login, if this error persists.

This is exactly the response end user would see normally that is received in response to Ajax request due to some exception or an error.

After the scrapbook was reloaded this problem was solved.

PS: I have already reported this issue to Orkut with issue# 227669358

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