On 19 August 2015 at 14:26, Sam Klein <sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
> There's a more general problem here we should fix:
>
> We already know that effectiveness of any single banner drops off
> dramatically after the first few views. So there's rarely a reason to run
> a continuous banner -- certainly not if there are other banners to run.
I think we should be cautious about using our fundraising experience
to predict the efficiency of 'delayed call-to-action' banners like WLM
- to my mind they seem to function in quite different roles.
The fundraising banner is calling for an immediate action. You see it,
and you either donate or you don't. If you decide not to donate, you
probably won't decide to donate on seeing it tomorrow, either; while
if you have donated, you're probably not going to donate again. So the
banner being repeated doesn't gain us much, and it has progressively
less value on the third, fourth, fifth appearances. There are
relatively few people who see a fundraising banner and decide "I'll
sleep on it", then come back tomorrow and donate. And if they *do*,
well - there's a donate link on every page, once they're looking for
it.
However, WLM is calling for a delayed action - "go off, do something,
and come back again to tell us about it".
The most desired outcome is probably that a previously uninvolved
person will see it, click through, think "that sounds fun", and go off
to take some photos - after all, it's running all month, they can do
it at the weekend. A few days later they come back, and want to upload
their photos... but if the banner's not there on Wikipedia, they won't
really know where to go. They might not remember the name ("Wiki
something?"), making it hard to search for the contest, and they
probably didn't bookmark the WLM pages. There isn't anything else on
the page that would help to take them there, and if they're not
involved in the projects already they probably won't know where the
information's likely to be. If we can't make sure they can find WLM
easily when they return, then we've wasted the original call to
action, we've wasted the potential contributions, *and*, most
importantly, we've wasted their time and goodwill.
I think this difference in intended response styles makes it hard to
generalise from the "diminishing returns" experienced on fundraising.
Yes, a repeated banner will get progressively diminishing
clickthroughs. But with WLM, those second clickthroughs in some ways
provide the "value" to the first clickthrough - they need to return to
make the campaign a success, which isn't really a concern for
fundraising. We need to make sure that that channel is open and
visible in some way when they come back.
Andrew.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk
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