Without Research, You’re Missing the Best Ad Venues
Conventional advertising planners have it (relatively) easy. There are multiple services that help them define the best places to advertise in a given market. There are planning services that help them manage the placements. And, once placed, many conventional advertising venues aren’t very measurable, so they don’t have to worry about metrics.
It’s seductive to apply this same game plan to online, using one of the online ad planners or online networks that promise broad exposure for very little work. And it’s certainly easy to track the results.
But when the results come in — results like 0.05% clickthrough, $500 cost per acquisition — you can salve your conscience by knowing that you have managed to buy 20,000,000 “impressions.”
Fact is, online ad planners may be fine for broad-based advertising campaigns, but they aren’t ideal for response-based campaigns. If you want to engage an audience, you have to target them, get their attention, and give them a reason to respond. Many online ad planners or networks don’t give you the ability to do any of these things.
• Targeting. This goes beyond geographic, demographic, and behavioral targeting. If you’re looking to hit a specific geographic or demographic, you need to look at that community. In a recent ad campaign, a small, inexpensive placement on an enthusiast site outperformed an entire expensive ESPN ad buy. Why? Because the enthusiasts are engaged. The brand of the enthusiast site augmented the brand that was advertised in the banner.
• Attention. Again, many ad networks fail here. Why? Well, if your ad is one of thousands circulated through, you can’t own a position. Here this visit, gone the next. Users won’t expect to see you there. You take no brand equity from the sites you are on, because you’re never there long enough.
• Action. You can have the best creative in the world, but if it doesn’t match your venue, it won’t produce the results you expect. With a broad-based network, it’s impossible to match the creative to the venue. Even with multiple creatives, you’re at the mercy of the optimization algorithms.
For maximum effectiveness, an online advertising plan must include what Centric calls Deep Venue Research. Deep Venue Research uses a combination of tools — from blog search and Technorati ratings to keyword effectiveness tools and site referrers — to identify the most effective places to advertise. Combined with some intelligent network buys and ongoing optimization of the complete campaign, this provides response rates and user engagement far in excess of typical online advertising plans.
What process is your agency using? If they aren’t employing this level of research, it’s likely your results are less than they could be.
