this whole article is practically useless without data on how the incoming traffic ultimately converted on momentgarden.com. (how many sales did you generate from picture B over picture D?) just like eve online's a/b testing that led to using pictures of attractive, loosely clothed women indicates you can always increase click through rates by getting closer to porn. what good are CTRs when your traffic is more interested in the picture they clicked than the product you're selling?
You're looking at this the wrong way, let's say you have some rotting hops, malt and barely and need to sell this fetid stuff. The key is to get your product associated with attractive women. if you do it long enough there will be an association. I bet the wine industry could get men drinking wine if they used the same approach.
It's true that ultimately for our product, conversion into customers is what matters in the end. But I don't think that makes this article useless.
Almost all businesses want to get people "through the door" to your website or product, and our experiment shows how you can do that for a relatively low price.
A logical follow on would focus on the landing page and conversion, but that is beyond the scope of this original experiment, which was to show you the mechanics of lowering your CPC.
I think the parent is right: Businesses don't just want to get people through the door, why attract people who will never buy anything at all, ever, and moreover will drop their food wrappers, mess up the produce abuse your staff, etc.. I think there are similarly toxic customers for online businesses (though I'd guess they tend to waste less resources) - e.g. those who will use things and return them for a refund even when they're not faulty.
Slightly aside, aren't the ads targeted to Pakistan cheaper because the ad costs as a proportion of revenue per item are likely to be far higher if the ads are simply charged as if for a company operating in a "richer" nation? Isn't ad competition higher in richer nations?
To make it clearer - using the Big Mac index - Denmark comes in at $5 and Malaysia at $1.50. I'd expect advertising costs to people in Malaysia to be at least a third of those to people in Denmark (barring other over-bearing factors).
Definitely that's the reason the ads are cheaper in less developed and less wealthy countries. It's simple supply & demand: obviously there are more people targeting ads towards users in the U.S. and other wealthy countries.
We touched on a lot of this in the article, and in fact the title clause "(and why you might not want to)" was referring specifically to that point!
That being said, there is a tremendous amount of useful techniques you can learn from this approach, and you can choose apply those towards whatever demographics you are marketing to.
It's up to each person to decide the specific goals of their ad campaigns, but I'm hoping this article outlines some techniques that will help you achieve those goals.
