Gary Dahl. Advertising for Dummies
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
An animated flash banner maker costs only $19.95.
An advanced (static) banner costs only $14.95.
A GIF button costs $9.95.
A GIF banner is free (heck — you can’t deny your attraction to that word!).
You can also search the Web for “ad networks” to come up with a huge list of
sites that can carry your ads for free.
Placing your online ads yourself
If your customer base is well-defined, you can find appropriate sites and
approach them yourself. A simple way to do this method is to search the
Internet by using a few keywords of interest to your customers. (You’re look-
ing for sites that share interests or content similar to your own.) You can get
a list of sites that may be appropriate for placing your ad. Check them out
and ask whether you can place your banner on their site for a fee or whether
you can simply exchange banners at no cost to either party (called a
reciprocal link).
For example, suppose you sell baseball cards. Go to a search engine and type
in “baseball” or “sporting goods.” The list that comes up under either search
may have a site perfect for you. Don’t type in “baseball cards” as your search
term because the sites that appear there are your competitors. They won’t want
your banner on their sites, and you don’t want their banners on your site.
Although this approach can be effective, it takes time and an ability to negoti-
ate a fair price.
Online advertising via affiliate programs
You can also advertise your business via affiliate programs (also known as
partnership programs or associate programs). You contract to place ads on
your site, and you are paid when a visitor to your site clicks through or pur-
chases something from another site.
Affiliate programs are carefully targeted to the interests of your visitor. For
example, if you have a Web site dealing with antique furniture, you don’t want
to become an affiliate of a sporting good site, for example. Affliliate programs
are good for sites that are narrowly focused — and zillions of topic-specific
sites are out there. Amazon.com was the very first affiliate — it offers a per-
centage of the sale if one of your visitors buys from Amazon.com after click-
ing on its link from your site.
182
Part III: Buying the Different Media
18_045833 ch12.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 182
One drawback, if you’re considering becoming an affiliate, is that frequently a
visitor who clicks through to another site doesn’t return to yours. However,
you have a few ways to ensure that a visitor actually remains on your site
even though he has clicked on an ad. If you’re not an HTML expert, hire a
Web designer to help you accomplish this.
Find out more about affiliate programs by visiting www.associateprograms.
com or www.clickquick.com.
Finding out whether your
banner is working
After you run your banner ads, find out how effective they are. You can do
this by using several kinds of statistics:
Impressions: The number of times an ad appears on a Web page.
Click-through: The number of times people select/click on your banner
or button.
Click-through rate (CTR): The number of times the ad is clicked on
divided by the total number of times people see your ad.
183
Chapter 12: Investing in Internet Advertising
Pay schedules
Online ads have three major pricing structures:
Cost per thousand (CPM): This cost of an ad
is for every 1,000 times the ad is displayed.
Most of the time, when you buy a CPM, your
banner appears on big, highly trafficked
Web sites. Sometimes this type of pricing
structure is called
pay per face,
but it’s the
same thing — the cost of 1,000 impressions.
(An
impression
is the number of times an ad
appears on a Web page.)
Cost per click (CPC): You only pay for this if
someone clicks on your banner ad and is
taken to your site. Be a little careful before
plunging in to this type of ad. Your audience
is
better targeted, but the cost is higher, and
you’d better be able to convert these visits
to sales if you want to make money. Sites
like www.valueclick.com buy unused
ad space on prime locations. Some compa-
nies don’t sell by CPC because the quality of
a banner is a determining factor in how
much they earn, and it’s a factor those sites
can’t control.
Cost per transaction (CPT): You pay when
you make a sale. This choice offers great
accountability, but you do pay a significant
percentage for this type of fee structure.
This structure is also known as
cost per
action
(CPA).
18_045833 ch12.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 183
Conversion: The rate at which some goal is achieved (sales or orders or
traffic building, for example).
Hit: Every component of a Web site viewed by a visitor. If you have one
Web page with 20 graphics and a visitor looks at all of them, you have
21 hits.
In general, the conversion rate is the most important statistic. Number of hits
is largely meaningless, but I include it on this list because you probably hear
the term everywhere. Don’t be fooled. You’re interested in click-through rates
and conversion rates rather than just the number of impressions.
You can get these statistics in several different ways. If you join a program,
you can either buy banner placements (a fixed number of impressions) or you
can trade ad space on your page for ad space on someone else’s Web site.
When you join a program, you get access to individualized statistics that you
can view any time you want. You can find out how many times people have
seen your ad and also how many times people clicked over to your page. To
get the conversion rate, you have to work with your Web host (the supplier
of your e-commerce software).
You can also buy log-analysis software or even hire a company to track your
data and provide you with customized reports. You can find companies that
provide log analysis by typing the keyword “log analysis” in any Internet
search engine.
Assessing the Cost-Effectiveness
of E-Mail Advertising
Today the return on investment is high for e-mail advertising. One reason is
that you have few upfront costs — an enormous advantage. You can, of
course, simply do it yourself, by writing a message to customers just as you
would to a friend, and then bcc’ing your customers’ e-mail addresses. The
only real “cost” of doing this is your time. This approach isn’t very sophisti-
cated; however, you may find it useful if your business is just starting out.
(For tips on how to create a successful e-mail advertising campaign, see
Chapter 6.)
If you think about the e-mail you receive from businesses, most of it has a
Web site link attached to it, where you can buy goods. For example, I get fre-
quent e-mails from Lands’ End, The Container Store, and J. Crew because I’ve
shopped there in the past, and they notify me when they’re having a sale or
when new merchandise is available. These huge companies clearly have an
e-mail advertising team to handle their campaigns.
184
Part III: Buying the Different Media
18_045833 ch12.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 184
You can also hire a company to handle your e-mail ad campaigns: Simply type
“e-mail advertising” into a search engine, and you can find companies that have
software to handle mass e-mail (and other direct-response mass-marketing
communication vehicles) and that provide their own servers that can handle
huge bandwidth. They can also provide you with reporting feedback on how
effective your campaign is: How many people have viewed your message,
how many clicked-through from your message to your Web site, and how
many people opted out of your advertising campaign. For example, www.
emarketingblitz.com is just one site that offers this service.
Keep in mind that your e-mail is competing with hundreds of other e-mails
jamming someone’s inbox. And people grow less tolerant as time goes by.
Most ISPs and other e-mail service providers have spam blocking programs,
to allow clients the choice of filtering their mail. Advertisers may eventually
have to pay for the chance to slip past the guards. That’s not necessarily a
bad thing. Sometimes paying a little more decreases the competition.
As Internet advertising continues to proliferate, marketing professionals
develop new ways to measure its effectiveness. One company (Marketing
Sherpa) conducted research in 2004 to find out how seasonality affected the
best day of the week to send e-mail. It evaluated the open and click rates
from more than 60 million e-mail messages sent by 7,000 marketers — and
found that the best day of the week is a moving target. (If you’re interested in
the details, check out www.marketingsherpa.com.)
E-mail advertising effectiveness varies among industries. An August 2006
study that Harte-Hanks, Inc., a direct-marketing company, conducted looked
at 4,300 business and consumer e-mail campaigns. Here are the best and
worst results:
Restaurants had the best result, with a 167.7 percent open rate (an open
rate of more than 100 percent occurs when people pass along and/or
reopen the e-mail); restaurants also had the best click-through rate, of
57.5 percent.
Retail had the lowest open rate, of only 35.3 percent.
The automotive industry had the lowest click-through rate, of only
5.7 percent.
In case you’re curious, here are the click-through results for all 13 industry
categories that Harte-Hanks, Inc. studied, from best to worst:
1. Restaurants: 57.5 percent
2. Publishing: 55.6 percent
3. Pharmaceuticals: 23.8 percent
4. Travel and hospitality: 23.4 percent
185
Chapter 12: Investing in Internet Advertising
18_045833 ch12.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 185
5. Conference events: 14.2 percent
6. Financial services: 11 percent
7. Technology: 10.9 percent
8. Government: 9.5 percent
9. Insurance: 9.5 percent
10. Consumer packaged goods: 8.6 percent
11. Entertainment: 8.1 percent
12. Retail: 6 percent
13. Automotive: 5.7 percent
These results don’t mean that you shouldn’t consider doing e-mail marketing
for your business if it’s ranked lower on this list. But it helps to know which
industries have been most successful getting through to people.
Your best results come from past and prospective customers who’ve given
you their e-mail addresses, because they want information from you on an
ongoing basis.
186
Part III: Buying the Different Media
18_045833 ch12.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 186
Chapter 13
Buying Ad Space in Print Media
In This Chapter
Knowing where to run your ads
Maneuvering the minefield of print ad pricing
Working with a sales rep
Getting the best deal possible
P
rint advertising includes everything from daily and Sunday newspapers
to consumer magazines, business-to-business publications (including
trade journals, newsletters, and professional magazines), and even the Yellow
Pages or other directories. According to Advertising Age’s 2005 “Fact Pack,”
the advertising pie included the following print media slices for the 100 lead-
ing national advertisers’ spending in 2004:
Newspapers: 17.4 percent (advertisers spent $46.6 billion)
Yellow Pages: 5.3 percent (ad costs totaling $14 billion)
Consumer magazines: 4.6 percent (a $12.25 billion price tag)
Business publications: 1.5 percent (amounting to $4 billion)
By comparison, advertising on broadcast TV was 17.5 percent (comparable
with newspapers), and direct mail advertising was the largest piece of the
pie, with 19.8 percent. Keep in mind, though, that these leading national
advertisers are the big guns who are spending big budgets. (Must be nice!)
Still, these figures give you some idea of how companies allocate their adver-
tising dollars, so you can determine the print advertising needs of your own
business.
In this chapter, I show you how to select the right print publications for your
particular business and how to negotiate with those publications after you
have narrowed down the list. Pay close attention, because newspapers and
other print publications have more discount rates than the stars in the
heavens — and you don’t want to pay one dime more than you have to.
19_045833 ch13.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 187
Choosing the Right Publication
for Your Print Ad
When you’re ready to get your print ad out there for the world to see, the
first thing you need to do is choose a venue. This task may seem like an easy
one, and sometimes it is. You can choose among major daily newspapers,
weekly papers, entertainment-oriented newspapers, trade publications
(business-to-business publications), consumer magazines, mailing inserts,
and on and on. Your mission is to choose the media that your potential cus-
tomers are reading. How do you accomplish that?
Although you may be tempted to put your ads in the publications that you
read (after all, they’re the ones you know), your ads will be a bigger success
if you put them where your customers can see them. Talk to people in your
target audience — your customers. Ask your current customers the following
questions:
Why they choose your store or business
How they decide to buy your product or service
What publications they read — both at work and at home
Which section of the newspaper they turn to first
Which media they’re likely to respond to when shopping around for
what you’re selling
With a little hip-pocket market research — where you ask a lot of relevant
questions of people who already know your store or business — you can pin
down the publications into which you should insert your ads.
Almost every consumer magazine and business publication offers a media kit
that provides information on the demographics of its subscribers — typically
in terms of gender, age, income level, and even marital status and the number
of children, depending on the publication. Some publications provide this
subscriber information online, but be careful when checking Web sites so
that you’re not just getting demographics for the online version of the publi-
cation, which may differ from the print version of the publication.
Media kits also give general guidelines to how much it costs to advertise in
the publication’s pages. Most kits have an annual schedule of theme topics
the publication plans to cover, which can help you develop your advertising
plans if your product or service is particularly tied to any of those topics. For
188
Part III: Buying the Different Media
19_045833 ch13.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 188
example, if your business is wrought-iron patio and lawn furniture and you
know that Better Homes and Gardens magazine is doing an article about
buying outdoor furniture in the next May magazine, you may want to adver-
tise in that month’s issue.
Calculating Your Print Ad’s Cost
I have good news and bad news about print media ad costs. The good news is
that most print media actually have easy-to-read (albeit somewhat difficult-
to-understand) rate cards that list the various costs for assorted ad sizes — a
welcome relief from the way radio advertising is negotiated, as I describe in
Chapter 14.
The bad news is that the rate card is nothing more than a starting point in
the media-negotiation and buying process, because newspapers, especially,
have created so many permutations of their basic (or open) rates that even a
professional media buyer has trouble deciphering them in order to come up
with the most frugal media buy. And after you discover the nuances of one
publication’s rates and myriad discounts, you can then call the next publica-
tion and start all over again — no two publications’ rates and discounts are
alike. (I think they do this just to totally confuse you and to give their sales-
people a reason for being.)
After deciding where you’re going to put your ad, you need the help of a sales
rep (see the section “Finding a Good Sales Rep” later in this chapter) to figure
out what the ad’s going to cost you. But before you go into a meeting with a
rep, you need to know a few things about how print ads are priced.
For example, somewhere in the mists of time, all newspapers made the dia-
bolical decision that no two advertising pricing schemes would ever be the
same. Newspapers and other publications generally price print ads by multi-
plying the number of columns wide, by the number of inches high, by a dollar
amount for each column inch. For example, a quarter-page ad in most news-
papers is 3 columns wide by 11 inches high, which makes it a 33-column-inch
ad. So if the open rate for your local paper is $50 per column inch, you have
an ad that can cost you $1,650 for one insertion.
Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple. Here are just a few of the seemingly
infinite variations possible to that simple pricing structure:
The initial $50 per-column-inch rate can change for numerous reasons,
because it’s the open rate (the rate paid by a new advertiser who runs an
ad only one time).
189
Chapter 13: Buying Ad Space in Print Media
19_045833 ch13.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 189
If you’re willing to commit to running your ad multiple times over a cer-
tain time period, you can reduce the open rate by as much as 50 percent.
Newspapers and other publications often give discounts for new busi-
nesses, minority-owned businesses, first-time advertisers, political
advertisers, nonprofit groups, and so on.
If you’re willing to commit to three ads per week, and if you’re also will-
ing to make a substantial dollar commitment over an extended time
period, you can dramatically reduce your rate per ad.
You may qualify for more than one of these discounts — for example, if
you’re willing to commit to a long-term buy and you’re also a nonprofit.
Usually, newspapers offer what they call pickup rates. A pickup rate is a dis-
counted rate newspapers give in return for running the same ad two or more
times in the same week. For instance, if your first ad runs in the Sunday
paper, your newspaper rep may quote you a pickup rate as follows: “Our
pickup rates are 20, 30, 40, then 50, 50, and 50.” That’s her way of saying that
if you run your ad a second time in the same week, you receive a 20-percent
discount; a third insertion in that week gets you a 30-percent discount; a
fourth insertion gets you a 40-percent discount; and for every time you run
the ad in that same week after that point, you receive a 50-percent discount.
And the discounts apply to all ads you run.
190
Part III: Buying the Different Media
Cost per thousand
The cost of reaching the consumer via print is
often expressed in
cost per thousand
(CPM),
your cost if you want to reach 1,000 consumers
with your advertisement. For instance, coupon
booklets are usually target-mailed to groups of
10,000 households. To have your ad included in
a one-time mailing of a coupon booklet to a par-
ticular group of homes may cost you $275,
resulting in a CPM of $27.50 ($275 divided by 10).
In that same market, you may find that running
an ad in a daily newspaper may give you a much
different CPM. For example, running a print ad
that includes that same coupon may require a
3-column-by-2-inch ad (6 column inches). That
ad, priced at an open rate of $80 per column
inch, costs you $480. If the newspaper boasts a
circulation of about 300,000, your CPM is only
$1.60.
But hold on there! You have much to consider,
much to factor in. First, depending on which
section of the paper your ad runs in, count
on about only 20 percent of the paper’s total cir-
culation actually
seeing
your ads. Second, a
small coupon ad positioned on a full page of
newsprint is dramatically different (read,
dra-
matically less effective
) than a color coupon
printed and mailed to consumers in a coupon
booklet.
What’s the moral of this story? CPM is an impor-
tant consideration when evaluating the cost of
print advertising. However, you need to con-
sider other factors if you want to compare
apples to apples. My suggestion is to always
factor in the variables, stir in some gut feel, and
do the math so you’re aware of the CPM. Then
use all these aspects to make more sense of a
sometimes-confusing media choice.
19_045833 ch13.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 190
Clearly, the discounts definitely have a way of adding up! The ad in my exam-
ple earlier in this section, which I priced at $1,650 for a single insertion, ends
up costing $594 at the end of one week if you run it multiple times — which
gives you a discount of 64 percent!
Ad pricing is complicated, confusing, convoluted, and intimidating. The only
way you can be sure you’re getting the best rate possible is to tell your rep,
in no uncertain terms, “Give me all available rates.”
Finding a Good Sales Rep
If you’re buying print media, you deal, for better or worse, with sales reps
from the various publications — newspapers, magazines, Sunday supple-
ments, coupon books — into which you’re inserting your ads. Sales reps
come in many shapes, sizes, and abilities ranging from nearly comatose to
able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. So, unless you own a portable
defibrillator and can strap it on quickly, you want to look for a rep who is a
high achiever.
In some cases, you may not be able to choose a rep: Many national publica-
tions assign accounts to sales reps based on region of the country, so if your
business is in Detroit, you need to deal with a Michigan sales rep. Find this
info out early on. Call the publication directly, or many publications list this
information as well as the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of
their ad sales reps under the “Contact Us” or “Advertising” sections of their
Web sites.
In the following sections, I describe a variety of ways you can find a good
sales rep who will help you run your print ad, hopefully in the best format
and at the best time.
Cold-calling a publication: Don’t do it!
When you’re interested in buying an ad with a particular print media, you
don’t have to take the sales rep that the receptionist transfers you to when
you call the front desk. In fact, I’ve always believed that the really good reps
are busy taking orders, or they’re out in the field generating new orders, or
they’re visiting their many clients and taking care of business. So who
answers your call? Yep, the rep who’s lazy, or a rookie without a clue, or the
guy who’s waiting around the office hoping the phone will ring.
191
Chapter 13: Buying Ad Space in Print Media
19_045833 ch13.qxp 11/22/06 3:45 PM Page 191