So, I was taking in my daily news intake, browsing a blog article that I picked up on Hacker News. At the bottom of the article, I saw a Flash advert that actually puzzled me. It seemed interesting, worth at least a click to see what it was about. After all, Forbes is a respectable company, and I figured they wouldn’t advertise something like this unless there was something reasonably cool on the other side of that click.

So, expecting some information about this “most innovative and smart blog community”, I clicked. Woe unto me. This is where I landed:

No information, just a dubious, unfriendly signup form. I don’t know the exact stats, but I’d wager that they lost 99% of the click-throughs on this page. Way to go, Forbes. Such appalling ineptitude seemed worth poking a bit further. What exactly was this thing they were trying and likely failing to get people to sign up to? Fortunately, there was a help link in the top right:

I clicked it. Information about the service? Nah, of course not.

More clicking…

Perhaps now…

Fantastic. A completely useless blurb. Let’s give it one last shot. Adify’s website:

Dear god. Even their website is a failure. The only sentence 90% of people are likely to read if they ever get that far is “Are you ready to Adify?”. More than half of the above-the-fold space is wasted. Now, I don’t know about you, but my natural reaction to this is to close the window. Nevermind the text below that perhaps holds some sort of amazing information that will change my life. I’ve clicked about 10 times to get to this page and it still fails to tell me what I need to know to decide what this Forbes thing is all about.

This is doubly ironic considering that “Adify” is plainly some sort of blog advertisement venture. That an advertisement venture would fail so spectacularly at even advertising itself is just plain sad.

What should they have done?

How about make the advert link to a page with a clear set of straighforward, 5-7 words bulletpoints that immediately explain to the would-be member why they should join. Then, below that, a simple sign-up form asking people to just enter their email address to get more information. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just very basic online marketing.

If you’re going to pay good money to get people to click on your adverts, make sure you have an effective, self-contained, simple page on the other side that visitors can grasp and interact with within 5 seconds. Because most people will leave after about that amount of time if their interest hasn’t been piqued.