How to Avoid Advertising Disasters
I’ve been working with small businesses for long enough to know that most standard advertising is fairly ineffective for generating sales pipeline. Sadly I have learnt this the hard way, by wasting money on adverts that have generated a negative return on investment - the negative element being the loss of cash and moral! So why then do I occasionally get caught out by advertising sales reps?
A question I had to ask myself recently when I booked a quarter page ad in a publication in London that turned out to be a bit of a toad. The reason I would hazard a guess is twofold:
1. the skill of the sales rep in presenting a compelling opportunity, and
2. the client’s real need for new leads in these difficult economic conditions made me think twice
Of course when I learnt my advice on this one was a little wayward, I did the only decent thing and offered to cover the cost of the advert should the promised sales leads not appear. Watch this space to see if I have to get my cheque book out.
The other result is that I’ve decided to compile a checklist of questions I must ask and fully understand before I place an order. With the aim of helping everyone to get a better return on their advertising investment, I thought I’d share this here.
- Is the publication readership the same as my target audience / decision maker? (note it is important to really understand your target audience first!)
- Do I clearly understand the target audience description provided by the publication?
- Have I heard of the publication or is it launching?
- What is the format of the publication - A4, A5, glossy, newspaper, portrait, landscape, colour or black and white etc?
- Exactly what size will the advert be?
- Can I secure a guaranteed right hand page? (important as an advert placed on a right hand page generally outperforms those on the left hand page)
- Are any of my competitors advertising?
- What is the publication date?
- What is the publication’s reach - not just the circulation, but total reach?
- Will they offer any guarantees - cost per enquiry for example? (unlikely but worth asking)
- Can the publisher help to put together the creative?
- Have any of my competitors / peers advertised in the publication and if so what results did they achieve? (also, could I have their contact details so I can talk to them and find out about their experiences?)
- What is the total price?
These questions will help me to better understand whether the opportunity will present a return on investment i.e. a value of sales greater than the cost of the advertising. Ultimately, there are lots of other factors which will impact the success of the advert which are not the responsibility of the publication.
In particular, the quality of the text and images used in the advert and the strength of the call to action. For some guidelines on good advert copywriting, check out this post by freelance advertising copywriter John Kuraoka.
I’d very much like to hear the experiences of other small business advertisers as to how you measure and interpret whether an opportunity will present good value?
Tag:Advertising
Is there any point in Adsense?
Or is it just an ugly distraction from your blog content?
This is a question I have been wrangling with for a while. After all, when I decided to try and make some money from my blogs, this seemed like the easy way into some revenues. However, I’ve been blogging for two years now and I can honestly say that Adsense has been pretty fruitless. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve received a few payments from Google, but nothing to warrant the amount of time I‘ve put into my blogs. In fact as a business model, I’m pretty sure if I took the proposition to the Dragons Den I’d quickly find hear those dreaded words “I’m out”.
To be fair there are lots of little tips and tricks for optimising Google ads that I haven’t employed, such as putting links next to images, tweaking colours and styles to match your blog content and more. I’m sure if I had enough web properties I could generate a reasonable little trickle of income, but, I think it would always only be a trickle and to make any serious income I’d need a lot of blogs. In addition, I would need to think of multiple tactics, such as affiliate programmes and text link ads.
However, for the majority of bloggers I doubt that would produce revenues of a big enough size to quit your day job, not unless you have a lot of traffic – which most blogs don’t of course. So, I’ve taken the decision to remove Adsense from my blogs and to focus on the content along with pursuing opportunities that link my online and offline life i.e. work contracts, sponsorships, events etc.
I would be interested to hear of anyone else’s experience with Adsense.
Both from the perspective of people who own the content channels i.e. blogs etc, and those who advertise on AdWords using the content network. From my experience in both, I can honestly say I am doubting the value for most businesses. But I am happy to be proven wrong.
Of course, I’m not doubting Payperclick on the search networks which for me is an essential ingredient of any businesses marketing tool kit.
Tag:AdvertisingControversial Advertising Makes Waves
Here is the recent Mr T advert for Snickers that was cancelled by Mars as it was deemed to include anti-gay references. It seems to me that by ensuring the advert was cancelled, it has actually generated more coverage, made the video viral and probably enabled it to create a bigger splash.
You can vote for yourself in the comments as to whether you think it is offensive or anti gay…
Tag:AdvertisingadCenter Hits Harder
I little while ago I mentioned that I’d received some interesting information from Microsoft about their adCenter product. The info was actually some analysis of the ongoing research data compiled by Nielson into the quality of search traffic. The emphasis was placed on the difference in traffic quality by looking at conversion and levels of engagement / stickiness.
Now clearly this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it did make some interesting reading. For the engagement figures, the analysis showed that on average people who clicked through from Live Search would spend 4 mins 7 secs on the site, compared to an industry average of 3 mins 4 secs, or for Yahoo 3:31 and Google 2:55.
In other words…
Live Searchers are 35% more engaged on destination sites than the average UK searcher
What does this tell you? Well, once you’ve paid for your click and the customer is on site, you have a slightly longer amount of time to convince them to buy.
In terms of conversion, Nielson was only able to track whether searchers had actually reached the secure area of a site, rather than actually making a purchase. This creates quite a weakness if you ask me, however, we’ll look at the results in any case.
For Live Search, 7% of searchers went to a secure page after clicking through. This is against a 4% industry average or 5.3% for Yahoo and 3.6% for Google.
This might lead you to believe that Live Search brings more quality traffic, or as Microsoft puts it:
Live Searchers are 77% more likely that the average UK searcher, nearly twice as likely as Google searchers… to convert
So what does this tell you?
Well, there are a lot of questions we’d need to ask Microsoft to really interrogate the data. However at a fairly simplistic level you’d have to say adCenter seems to offer a very credible alternative to other paid for search advertising. With both stickiness and conversion rates higher than the industry averages it’s perhaps time to take adCenter a little more seriously.
From personal experience I’ve already transferred one of my clients PPC campaigns from Google to MSN and noticed a slow down in clicks (and therefore lower costs) but with increased traction. In other words, once someone clicks on an ad they are more likely to download the eBook we are offering and then move further along the sales cycle. The slow down in clicks is clearly a result of Live Search attracting less traffic than Google.
I have to say, I’m also a big fan of the telephone support on offer from Microsoft, so much better than email support on offer from the competition.
Well, if you haven’t yet, give Live Search and adCenter a go and let me know how you get on.
Tag:Advertising-
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