Online Advertising Tip - Make Sure Your Links Work

I saw a great ad on the home page of Yahoo! today for a promotion by Mars (check it out below). The ad told viewers to click on it to learn more about real chocolate and get a special coupon. I love chocolate, so I was more than happy to click on the link. Too bad it didn’t work — even after multiple tries.

mars_real_chocolate_ad_yahoo

Remember, if you run an ad on a popular website with an offer a lot of people are likely to be interested in, make sure that link is set up to always work. Get the bandwith you need to handle the traffic, make sure the page loads quickly, and so on. Do your homework first, so you don’t annoy your consumers later.

Susan Gunelius

Susan Gunelius is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc. and Founder & Editor in Chief of an award-winning blog, WomenOnBusiness.com. She is a 25-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored 10 books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing.

Comments

Scott says

May 8, 2009 at 9:36 am

I cannot understand how a company could run an short-term, online promotion and not ensure that everything is functioning. I’ve worked in IT for 20 years and know how important it is to ramp up your infrastructure to accommodate an online marketing campaign, but the fact that some links don’t work is disastrous. Not only did you lose an opportunity to garner new customers, you probably ticked off some existing ones. Not smart in this economy…
Ross Craven says

May 13, 2009 at 10:04 am

To be honest, i do not really understand why the company who is trying to advertise a new promotion on the internet is getting reports back from the members of public saying that there is a problem accessing the link. The company should already have the link working functionaly and not need any reports coming back from the public mentioning that they are able to access it.

As for this, I really think that this problem is a bad error to make.
You could not advertise a promotion on the internet when it will not let people access the link provided.