Fluffy Clouds Advent Calendar of links

Advent calendar

Advent calendar

It’s the festive season so we at Fluffy Clouds are proud to present our Advent Calendar of links for your delectation.

Links to great education sites

Every day in Advent, we will be adding a link here to another of our clients – our friends – same thing really…

So some back every day or follow the link updates via our Twitter feed.

Happy Christmas to one and all!

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1st December

Sparklebox – wonderful Early Years resources for free

2nd December

Terry Freedman’s ICT in Education site – he’s an ICT guru, you know!

3rd December

The wonderful ICTeachers – tip top source of essential information and resources for all teachers

4th December

Everything you need to know about the National Strategies on their amazingly comprehensive site!

5th December

Great primary interactive resources from Crickweb

6th December

The essential resource centre by teachers for teachers at Chalkface.net

7th December

Everyone’s involved somehow with CWDC – and why not?

8th December

Got GCSE pupils – Revision Centre is the place to go

9th December

The exam people – OCR

10th December

Primary Ideas – more ideas than you can shake a stick at

11th December

Generation Green – great free environmental resources

12th December

Primary Resources – the original source of great free primary stuff of all kinds

13th December

Teaching Ideas – Get fantastic free resources and ideas and join in as well

14th December

Teachit – 12,100 pages of English teaching resources!

15th December

Anderton Tiger with Russell Prue – training, conferences, web radio – everything!

16th December

Compucharge – laptop security and charging for schools

17th December

Jeans for Genes – sign up for 2010!

18th December

RM – everthing for school ICT

19th December

A new friend out of an old friend – get along to the fantastic Primary Teacher Resource Centre!

20th December
Who could live without the essential 2Simple software?

21st December

The most influential underground movement in education – TeachMeet

22nd December

One of our latest Twitter buddies – we have over 100 now! Cloudhosts

23rd December

Time for a great cause – CancerNursing.org

24th December

The end of Advent so here’s us! Fluffy Clouds – experts in education advertising

Click through rates still high for education ads?

Banner

Banner

At Fluffy Clouds, we put education-focussed banner ads on education websites. We get better click-through rates than the big ad boys – you know the ones I mean. This is, we believe, because our campaigns are targetted to the specific audience of the websites who display our ads – all good…

So…when I saw this article I was a little concerned…it’s called ‘Is Online Banner Advertising Dying?’

Take a look at the pretty pie charts and things.

Between July 2007 and March 2009, banner ad non-clickers increased from 68% to 84%.

Oh dear. However, reading further, there are demographics and age stats but the one which caught my eye was Click Through Rates – as they say on the post, this is arguably the most important parameter of all.

As you can see, information/education has the largest share of click throughs of all banner ads.

Well, it made me happy anyway!

What do you think? Is it time to ditch banner ads? I don’t think so – Fluffy Clouds still get great CTR!

image credit:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheilascarborough/ / CC BY 2.0

Online advertising overtakes TV advertising

When I saw the tweets which pointed to the online Telegraph piece, my first reaction was, “Great – we can use this!”

You’ve probably seen the article at Telegraph.co.uk http://bit.ly/42BTmh but is this useful information for online advertisers or those considering adding online ads to their sites?

Acording to the study, ‘Internet’ advertising share is 23.5% while ‘Television’ received 21.9% of revenue. At the same time, overall advertising spend reduced by 16%.

Of course, this is spend, and says nothing about what actually works in advertising. If advertisers are abandoning TV are they actually getting value-for-money out of online advertising instead?

Reading further, display ads are said to be performing well against more traditional forms of advertising but we need to see the evidence of this in hard data.

I suppose this is what I am saying -

there is a danger in using articles such as this one to justify online advertising.

Is this headline is a rallying cry for everyone to shift to online advertising? This article is not, in itself, an academic study of the effectiveness of different forms of advertising. If we want to influence advertisers, we need to be basing our assertions on cold, hard evidence.

So what do you think?

5 reasons to have targeted advertising on your education blog or web site

 

1. Get money to keep going

If your site or blog is popular, you’ll want to keep it running and develop what you offer to other passionate educationalists. Once you reach a certain level, you can’t do that without money. Running targeted ads brings you more revenue than mass banner ad companies.

2. Give your visitors stuff they like and want

Visitors actually like to see ads which offer them suff they are interested in – they tend to be turned off by generic, untargeted ads which they can see on any old site. Targeted ads will wncourage visitors to return as it improves their total visit experiennce. “I visited that maths site I like and found a link to a brilliant resource for my Interactive Whiteboard – I bought it for my class and they love it!”

3. Look more professional

Badly placed ads can ruin a site’s design (or make it even worse than it was).  However, used appropriately, a professionally-designed ad from a top educational supplier or oganisation can actually enhance the look of any page. Nobody likes to see a site with loads of ads running at the top, on the left and right making the whole thing look untidy but a carefully-positioned, professional-looking ad from a relevant and useful source can give a real touch of class.

4. Make connections with top educational suppliers and national education organisations

Targeted ads are run on fewer sites and the advertisers always know where their ads are running – and they visit to see how they look. This is a great way to let top companies and national organisations know who you are and what you are getting up to – who knows where that could lead?

5. Stay in control of what appears on your site

 The whole point of running tageted ads is that you have total control of the ads which appear on your site. Mass ad companies can’t give you that. You can always refuse to run a campaign you don’t like – it’s your site after all!

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So what’s it to be? Random ads or targeted ads?

Make sense? Get in touch with Richard – richard@fluffyclouds.co.uk and he’ll sort you out.