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Recently, I have been using Fullstory to view how my visitors behave on my landing page - and boy does it make a huge difference when that visitor comes from Google or Facebook ads.
Regular visitors from an email that I send out, or from a mailing list, reddit, forums, among others - actually read the content on the landing page. You can see the mouse move across the text as they read in some instances. You can see how they scroll, the breaks they take to digest. Though the clip is 3X faster than usual, below you can see how the scrolling and mouse movements make sense. [Ed. note: Clips are on source page.]
This visitor is very different - it feels like its a paid slave somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence, or a person that does not read. The mouse rarely moves, it does scroll - though mostly in one direction, and the pace is as if the visitor is not reading the content. Mobile users just scroll and scroll until the bottom and then they leave.
As a result I have stopped all my Google and Facebook campaigns and have focused on growing the service more organically via social sharing and friends. Has anyone else experienced this as well? I'd be happy to share videos or more details, but the difference is clearly noticeable. I'd be interested to see if Fullstory has any high-level analysis of this or if they can verify this behavior.
[...] I am not sure if this is true, but does anyone else experience very, very, very, different click-through and conversion rates on Google and Facebook relative to other organic means?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday January 18 2017, @10:34PM
The more relevant the advertisement, the more effective it'll be and the more likely the person seeing the ad will buy something. So if you have some way of connecting to people that are highly likely to want your product, that's obviously the best place to concentrate your efforts.
Yeah, they don't seem to get this. When people are shopping for something online (really ready to spend for something in particular) they do not start randomly browsing websites hoping an ad for the product pops up. The best mass marketing should hope to be is a useful source of information, an ad for a product someone may want in the future, so should someone be curious enough to click on an ad they learn something about that product. Of course, they are more likely to be curious if the ad is for something relevant to what is on the page they chose to visit. When it is time to shop, that product may at least be a consideration when they visit their normal shopping sites. That's the way it worked for television, radio, magazines and newspapers for a long time, and there is no reason to think that does not or cannot translate to the internet. Instead, what we get are script and flash laden pages forced upon us that annoy the crap out of visitors even if they are not trying to install malware, more likely to chase away potential customers than attract them. The end result of course is the blocking of ads by site visitors, so everyone loses.