NetAudioAds Do Not Drive Visitors Away

NetAudioAds has been through some heavy trials and tribulations over the past few months. There has been a ton of bad press perpetuated by people that are not in the advertising industry saying that Internet audio ads are a bad idea.

I can see their point of view. The average consumer hates advertising no matter what form it takes. Negative press always follows in the face of something that is new and uncharted. This was fully expected. The bottom line is the fact that our economy needs advertising in order to stimulate spending which in turn keeps everyone employed.

Another common misconception about NetAudioAds is the assumption that 5 second audio ads will drive customers away. Being the avid tester that I am I have put this to the test.

From the dates of February 20th - March 20th I placed a 5 second audio ad on my home page at seo2020.com. Here are the stats for that page for 2/20/2008 - 3/20/2008:

As you can see there were 3,629 visitors to the home page during the period and the bounce rate is at 47.81%.

The visitor averaged 2 minutes and 15 seconds on the page.

The goal here is to prove all the may sayers wrong about audio ads driving people away from a site. I am finding the "reality" to be quite different and SEO20/20 is not the only website that I have placed the audio code on for testing.



Okay ... now let's look at the traffic and bounce rate prior to the time when I had audio ads placed on the home page:

As you can see between the dates of 1/19/2008 and 2/19/2008 there were 4025 visits with a 52.22% bounce rate and an average visit time of 2 minutes and 37 seconds.

What is shocking is the fact that the content on the page in question had not changed during the test and non-test period yet the bounce rate was higher when I didn't have an audio ad playing.

It would appear, at first glance, that the audio ad is actually lowering my bounce rate. People are not leaving the page as often during the test period.

I have more stats to share on this but will save it for a future blog post. I am seeing first hand evidence that clearly shows that NetAudioAds do not drive visitors away from a website. The people that would like to see this program fail are speculating that it would without evidence or proof to substantiate such claims.

I have the proof and the proof continues to come in...