Marketers sometimes
find it hard to evaluate what are the benefits in classified web advertising on
our computer portals such as the
SPARC Product Directory and
STORAGEsearch. The reason is, that
what you see doesn't explain what you get.
In fact the free company
profiles which a company gets by contacting us and submitting content such as an
article or a press release, look remarkably similar. If you contribute a good
article to our publication, we run your logo in the article, and will probably
add it to your company profile too. So visual clues like "is there a
company logo?" can't help you tell which company is an advertiser from a
cursory glance at the profile page. We value content contributions from all
companies, even if they just send us news from time to time. And we don't insult
the intelligence of our readers by pop ups, flash images or other types of
trickery.
It's no wonder that many potential advertisers I talk to
find it hard to understand why they should pay thousands of dollars a year for
what looks like a subtle changes in the style of their company profile.
Of
course, if that was all there was to it, they shouldn't... and we wouldn't
bother trying to sell it. But typically 75% to 90% of our classified ad slots
are presold upto a year in advance, and have been since well before the
millenium. So there's more to it than that.
Web advertising, like
quantum mechanics is not an intuitive process. It all comes out of the numbers.
And the theory can give you a headache. But just as you don't need to know
quantum theory to operate your CD player, you don't need to spend years
analysing web statistics to see why web advertising works. Someone has already
done that, and is selling a package which makes it as easy as selecting the
products you want to sell. Totally hands-free.
Print advertising has
been around a lot longer than web advertising (which only started in 1995 and
is still evolving) and print ads are easier to analyse. In a printed directory
it's easy to see that some pages are better than others. For example, the front
and back covers, and opposite high volume pages like the contents page are good
locations for adverts. But just as it's hard to tell from looking at someone's
home page which web site gets a thousand visitors a year, and which one gets a
million, it's actually impossible to tell just by looking at the destination
pages in a portal why they work. That's because the reason is to do with the
navigation signposting and other mechanisms which feed traffic to that page, and
not the actual destination page itself. (See also:- the article
"Portal
Secrets: browse next page")
A classified advertiser on our
computer sites can have tens of thousands of pageviews a year on their ad pages,
compared to other companies, in the same line of business, which are not
advertisers who will typically get an order of magnitude less. So the difference
is one of scale. And also cost. However, the costs are lower than you might
think because classified advertising is much lower cost that banner ads (for the
same lead generation) typically 5 to 10 times lower, depending on the product.
If you tried to get 30,000 qualified pageviews for your latest product on your
own site using banner advertising, you'd probably have to run millions of banner
impressions and spend a lot more money. I explained the different pros and cons
of these two types of advertising in my February 2000 article
Aspects of Web
Advertising. In the real world, you need both, but striking the balance can
be hard. That's where the person selling you the advertising should be able to
advise you.
So: what you see isn't what you get. Where you came from,
i.e. the route is the most important difference between similar looking web
pages. Some pipes are a lot fatter than others, and most readers will
statistically follow the easiest routes.
So what about the companies
with free entries? Are they merely supporting a cunning process which benefits
their rivals? Not at all. All companies which aren't advertisers on our sites
get benefits from their free visibility. I'm often told by companies that don't
advertise, that we are the #4 or #5 site referring traffic to them. So it's a
win-win situation, although the dice are loaded in favor of advertisers and
content providers.
And as for the people who pay for all this stuff?
The advertisers? Well, most of our original 1996 web advertisers are still
advertising with us now. Because they know it works. And that's the best test of
all. | |
|
