By Peter Marsh, Atex VP of Global Product Management
Posted on December 9 09:10, 2011
The digital universe is a crowded place for news, information and advertising. People want a filter. We crave trusted sources for the content we consume. Credibility matters. And, credible content is key to monetizing web, tablet and mobile online channels.
Credibility helps to establish brand loyalty. At the same time, certain brand channels are viewed as more credible than others. In a recent survey of 3,000 consumers in North America, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and Hearst Interactive found that 72% trust content on branded media sites, compared to only 23% that trust content on social media sites. The study found that consumers who visit branded media sites are three times more likely to regard the site’s advertisers as credible in comparison to portals and social media sites.
Credibility matters because trusted content leads to audience loyalty. Websites with content that’s deemed trustworthy correlate strongly with audiences being loyal to these sites. In short, people will come to your brand – and keep returning – if they find your content to be credible.
At the same time, credibility has a brand halo effect that extends to your advertisers. Ads appearing on a trustworthy website are perceived as credible and reputable. The OPA study clearly found that the credibility of your content carries over to the credibility of the advertising on your site. Consumers who are loyal to branded media sites are more than twice as likely to purchase from advertisers on these sites as consumers who are loyal to portals or social media sites.
Contextual advertising also has an impact on credibility. Late last year, an Online Journalism Credibility study was conducted with 1,239 respondents to a seattletimes.com survey. There were five important findings that emerged from this study.
First, twice as many people found online advertising to be valuable when the ads were relevant to the content of the page. Advertisers will pay more for contextual ads because readers find them more valuable.
Second, contextual advertising on “soft news’’ pages (e.g. sports, entertainment, travel and living) was viewed as more credible than contextual advertising on hard news pages. Twenty percent of respondents reported a decrease in credibility when a contextual ad appears on a page containing hard-news stories about politics or health. Conversely, 15 percent of the respondents reported increase in page credibility when the contextual ad appears on softer news pages.
Third, labeling an ad as an “advertisement” has a positive effect on the credibility of the entire page. Design elements like color, graphics or page positioning can make it difficult to easily distinguish an ad from news. Respondents react unfavorably when this distinction is not clear, and tend to rate both the ad and adjacent news content as less credible.
Fourth, the study found that too many contextual ads will negatively impact credibility. Also, if the tie-in between advertising and editorial content is too direct, respondents often feel that the article itself is sponsored, which decreases the credibility of the entire page.
Finally, the study tested a variety of contextual ad formats, including display ads, banners, text links, graphic ads, and navigational link ads. Display ads were the most likely to be noticed and also received top ratings for increased ad credibility compared to other ad formats. In addition, page position impacts the credibility of contextual advertising. Ads appearing in the right-column of the page received significantly higher ratings than ads in the main content area.
This is good news for online news publishers and advertisers alike. Branded news sites are clearly more credible than portals or social media sites. People also gravitate to online news site to validate the credibility of information they find from search engines. Ads appearing on these sites are viewed as more trustworthy because the credibility of the site extends to the credibility of the advertisers. Contextual advertising, if used properly, helps to further boost the credibility of the site. And, contextual ads have double the conversion rate of run-of-site ads. Consumers who click on ads targeted specifically to them are more than twice as likely to buy the advertised product or service.
Credibility matters… and it pays. If you would like to learn more about what you can do to help improve the credibility of your content, including a couple of the latest search ranking tricks involving Google Profiles, please request the latest Atex whitepaper “Why Credible Content is Key to Monetization.”
