Why bother placing an ad, then?
A website I was going through put a large banner ad for Godiva chocolates, with a part of the large image even dedicated to inform me (or anyone else reading the ad) that the Godiva site in now secured by VeriSign, and is safe to purchase from. I assume it doesn’t mean anything beyond the fact that they got an SSL certificate from them, or are using them to verify credit card transactions…
Out of curiosity I decided to click the ad, and see what exactly are they selling. And I got back a 404 page, an error page telling me that “A problem was encountered during processing:
Sorry, the file you are looking for does not exist.”
Wonderful, isn’t it? If they get paid by click-through, this is one ad that they show everyone, and will never see a dime from. And while it’s clearly the fault of the site showing the ad (The error page was on their own site, not Godiva’s), it reflects badly on the ad content. When you click on a banner of a site informing you how secure and well done it is, only to not be able to get there, well…
Oh, and of course the error page itself contains more ads. But this time for other sites.
April 27th, 2005 at 20:30 EET | Categories: Marketing |
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