Posted by Ad Hustler | Posted in Traditional Media | Posted on 19-12-2008
Last night I went down to Carolines Comedy Club in NYC to see some radio personalities that I enjoy from The Howard Stern Show. I went with my dad who is a fan of these comedians as well. After the show my dad kept talking about how he wanted to show me a bathroom he found and thought I would like. Weird. So we walk a couple of blocks and I see this:
It’s a restroom sponsored by Charmin. When you enter, they have all the walls wallpapered with the Charmin bears and take you up an escalator into a disco like area. There is a DJ who is way too happy, pimping out Charmin toilet paper. As you get towards the DJ booth, he is talking and asking people if they need to take a number 1 or a number 2 and then directs you towards a bathroom. Each bathroom has an attendant. When you enter the bathroom its basically a DJ booth with a toilet and sink. When your done, an attendant runs in and cleans the bathroom making it ready for the next person. The DJ also asks everyone if they washed their hands. It’s all pretty weird. The next room has different areas that you can take pictures with teh Charmin Bears and learn the Charmin Toilet Paper dance:
As you leave they have samples of Charmin products for you to try and take with you.
My point to telling this story is that advertising is not all direct response. For Charmin to rent a building in Times Square, NY to carry on these shenanigans does not create direct response results. What it does is expose masses of people to the brand by having them try it first hand. It creates a top of mind awareness so that when people go shopping for their home essentials, they hopefully choose Charmin. Although a lot of what we do in affiliate marketing is all about direct response, don’t forget the branding element when creating websites.
It’s pretty well established that local online advertising is the next frontier. Local businesses have and will be jumping online to spend their advertising dollars. Local search has grown at an exponential rate over the last few years. I happen to have vast experience in the local search arena as I have done it for years. Local search is more difficult then national search for a few reasons. The clicks tend to be more expensive and the targeting is not all that precise. MSN’s local targeting is almost non existent. Yahoo’s is not too great as it only really targets on a DMA based level. Google boasts the most comprehensive local targeting out of any of the search engines. Unfortunately it has some major major problems that not everyone knows about.
Google targets local users in a number of ways but the main way is by IP address. IP address targeting is not all that reliable which makes Google’s local targeting also not too reliable. Clicks also tend to be quite expensive.
For a current campaign, I’m paying $4-$6 per click for specific keywords related to my niche. The traffic however converts very very well which makes up for the price. The region I’m targeting is a suburb of NYC. I am targeting it using the polygon tool in the targeting options of the Google Adwords account. Here is a screenshot:
I also use Google Analytics to track my traffic. This helps determine where visitors are coming from. Here is a screenshot of the last 30 days:
By looking at the targeting and the report all seems well. The analytics report shows a few clicks from outside of my targeted area but nothing major. No biggie right? All is well in regional targeting world……NOT! There are some major issues because a decent chunk of the leads being derived from the campaign are coming from WAY outside my targeted area. Since I have full access to the leads generated I can see the users location. Here are some examples of leads derived in the last 30 days and where they came from:
Central San Diego County, California
Jefferson City, Columbia, Missouri
Metropolitan Boston, Massachusetts
Central Dallas, Texas
New Hampshire
Buffalo, New York
Those are just a few examples of the leads derviced out of the last 900 or so clicks that are unacceptably outside my designated targeting area. This problem has been going on for years. Even though Google Analytics shows most of the traffic as within the area I’m targeting, something obviously is wrong since all of these leads are coming from outside the market area.
This is a problem that the internet advertising companies/networks are going to have to get right before local internet advertising is a viable and accepted advertising medium for small businesses.
We can all admit Google is good at what it does and usually good at what it sets out to do. Google is currently trying to tackle selling traditional media ads by offering print & radio ads. The catch is that they are selling these ads using their traditional auction based bidding model. As a marketer that knows a lot about advertising agencies I see some problems with this plan. Google’s whole methodology is on the market system, supply and demand drives prices which is great. The problem is that the demand has gotten great for Google Adwords for just about every keyword in existence. This demand has shortened supply and drove the prices of keywords through the roof.
Taking this situation into account, think about traditional media. If Google were able to command a large market share in selling Print and Radio ads (which I’m sure they will because they are Google) the same thing could potentially happen. Demand goes up, causing supply to go down and the prices for a Radio or Print ad skyrocket. Here’s my question. Why would advertisers and advertising agencies do this to themselves. With Google Adwords you have no choice but to bid on keywords if you want premium positions in the paid areas of Google. With Radio and Print you have an option. Just go direct to the source and buy what you want without bidding on it. The obvious advantage of going with Google is that you will be able to spread your ads out over multiple sources with one buy and hopefully better targeting; but will this benefit outweigh the disadvantage of driving prices up? Knowing the past, will advertisers and agencies willingly subject themselves to inevitably higher pricing by doing their media buying through Google? Only time will tell.
Posted by Ad Hustler | Posted in Traditional Media | Posted on 22-10-2008
Anywhere there is blank space an advertiser is willing to fill it. According to the Associated Press, NYC will be testing digital display’s for ads on the side of buses. These ads will essentially be rolling billboards. The cool part is that they will offer dayparting/GPS parting to allow the advertisers to display different messages at different times of the day in different neighborhoods. What did advertisers do before the days of such precise targeting? The answer is, they wasted a lot of money. The ads will be sold by Titan Worldwide (an outdoor media company).
How long before Google buys up this inventory and sells it through Adwords?
