The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement is a great book that explains why keeping your production line busy 24/7 isn’t always the best thing. It is a book that inspired many people and one of the must reads no matter which industry you are in.
You may be wondering why I am talking about this book in a site that’s mostly dedicated to online advertising and affiliate programs. Well, recently it dawned upon me, why not take some of the concepts of The Goal and apply it to online advertising as well. Let me explain.
I use a particular website statistics counter site to track the visits to my multiple websites. Those of you who earn some money through your online ventures like advertising and affiliate programs know how curious you are to keep monitoring your website statistics periodically to see how the day is progressing. Well, atleast I do. So, I spend quite a bit of time on the website. And this website uses Google AdSense. But within my 50+ visits of the websites per day, 7 days a week, I hardly remember clicking an ad ever. Yet, Google AdSense keeps bombarding me with lots and lots of ads. Now is that ringing a bell to my first sentence on The Goal? I mean, perhaps, churning ads all the time to the users is probably not the most optimal strategy of displaying ads.
When Google missed the 4th quarter results, their management mentioned how they were disappointed in experiments it had run on some of the approximately 20 social networks it works with, which include MySpace and its own Orkut. Sure, most people visiting MySpace are interested in things other than looking at ads. So, when you are throttling the ad network at 100% capacity, thinking it to be the conventional wisdom, perhaps, that’s where people need to revisit the strategy.
As we evolve as netizens, it’s important to not only solicit to us what we may like based on the context, but also to stop doing it based on our preference. Switching from text ads to banner ads is only going to increase the frustration and thanks to Firefox’s ability to block images from any host, it makes it less annoying.
