Back button breaks Internet advertising
Friday, March 23rd, 2007 - 1:40 pm - random thought
Just a quick observation – I was just looking at YouTube and as I clicked onto another page, a banner ad caught my eye.
It was something to do with a Cadburys Creme Egg user group. I was curious because a few years ago, I pitched for a job for them (rejected pitch here), and I’m wondering what they are up to.
Anyways, so I hit the back button and the page displays a different ad.
This strikes me as ironic, as about the the first time in years I actually wanted to click on a banner ad, I couldn’t.
Surely the web should work better than this by now? If a bit of content is on a page, then it should stay on the page?
Yes, I know I can use Google to find the page, but that’s not the point.
As you know it’ll most likely be a cache busting ad tag that causes the behaviour.
On the advertisers side your almost always going to want to get another ad impression counted rather than have the same ad displayed from user’s cache. Typical stats suggest something like 20% of page impressions are from people using the back button. That’s a lot of potential impressions to lose, compared to the very rare occasion that a user actually wants to look at the exact same ad they saw before.
Of course if your not rotating ads on the page in question, they’ll see the same ad creative, the cache busting will just ensures the publisher gets another ad impression counted.
I suppose the user’s browser could be configured to use only cached content when using the back button, if that’s the behaviour wanted. Though in a lot of cases they’ll want/expect page content to be updated, particularly on more dynamic pages such as News sites.