I often talk to B2B
computer advertisers who after disappointment with search-engine advertising ask
me why advertising in a portal such as STORAGEsearch.com should be any better?
They get hits, from their key word advertising but not much business.
I'm not surprised. I wrote
an article
about why good search-engine results aren't a substitute for real advertising
some years ago. That was from a search engine optimization viewpoint. But the
argument is the same for key word ads. Here's what you need to know.
- readers who regularly use a portal, tend to be more experienced in their
market. The more senior the buyer the more likely they are to use trusted
publications rather than waste time trawling round the web at random. These
are the people who could be your most valuable customers. After 13 years of
publishing computer directories it's something our advertisers already know.
- most of our own readers each month (ACSL is a leading IT
directory publisher) come from their bookmarks or one of our other publications.
They don't come from a preceding search-engine. So they are
never going to see your key word ad. It's true that we do get thousands
of new readers every month from search-engines ourselves (based on our rich
content and tens of thousands of external links here) but most of these new
readers tend to stick and don't go back via the search-engine route again unless
they can't find what they want here. And then they are most likely to just go to
another bookmarked site.
- sales and marketing people search for companies in a different way
to most end users. You know the name of your company. You know what you sell.
End users don't know you or your company, or may have a fuzzy idea at best.
That's why they prefer starting from directories, news and articles which start
out in a place they know.
- search-engines work well for consumers who don't have time to research the
focused publications for every passing interest they have. And they work well
for young people starting out in their careers. And they work well if you have
an infrequent B2B subject you need to research. But your customers aren't
stupid. Once they find a relaible complete portal which covers the subjects
they're interested in that's where they will return. That's where portal focused
advertising does most good.
|
|
| |
India's
secret army of online ad 'clickers'
An
article
in the Times of India reports how Google is being affected by
intermediary affiliate sites which make money by clicking on ads - regardless of
what they are about.
There has always been fraud associated
with pay for click advertising - right back to the earliest days of the web with
ClickExchange. That's why you should be wary of such schemes. Affiliated sites
which you know nothing about will generate streams of expensive and useless
pageviews which soak up your ad budget without getting results.
As a
publisher ACSL has always believed that the only reason you should ever renew
your web advertising is because you're getting good business results.
|
 |
Advertising
on
STORAGEsearch |
| When
Cheaperbyte's sales manager said "Accelerate your storage sales",
he knew just the right way to do it. | | |
