Online advertising - the back door
By Jon Fletcher - Managing Director
Advertising spend is migrating from traditional to "new media", primarily the web. Its a trend that started as a trickle and is fast becoming a flood. Among the reasons are that online advertising comes with excellent tools to precisely measure effectiveness and that advertising messages can be acted upon instantly. Combine these with significantly lower acquisition costs and you can see why the trend is accelerating.
There are established sites in most sectors dominating advertising opportunities; comparison sites, review sites, directory sites and over them all search engines with pay per click advertising offerings. Digital advertising agencies will have special relationships with most of these, reduced costs, preferential rates and a generally cosy relationship where everyone profits. So when comparing ROI with offline advertising its a great deal and really no contest, but is this the best comparison to be making?
A while back, we were sitting in the board room of a large London based digital advertising agency listening to an erudite young man explain to a client exactly how many visitors and sales could be generated by his preferred comparison site. His metrics were excellently presented, graphs convincing and the costs so large that it must be a good, no... great, opportunity for the client.
We had been asked to attend to give an alternative industry perspective and were able to point out a couple of problems. Firstly, the client was not competitive in their sector on price but on service and comparison sites are most effective when looking for cheap deals, not the best service offering. Secondly, this particular comparison site was the standard watering hole for a plethora of agencies and as such the costs were outrageous for online advertising, almost at offline levels.
An eye-opening Google experiment
Admittedly this one comparison site had armies of visitors marching through its doors and excellent search engine positions, but for every number one on Google there are nine more web sites in the top ten and many more keywords each with their own top ten. Try an experiment; look up the best keyword phrase in your area on Google. You won't be surprised by most of the top results and if you have a good online marketing agency you should be up there yourself. Are there any that you wouldn't expect, small companies, amateur sites, discussion forums? Try again for other keywords or phrases and you should see that these smaller sites can often be the rule rather than the exception.
You can see where this is leading... these small sites individually can compete with some of the larger ones and as a group can out perform them significantly. However, few even have advertising rate cards and many are blissfully unaware of just how valuable they are to you. It is possible to place advertisements that cost less than a tenth of the larger sites rates and can produce many times the results. The difficulty comes in getting the whole thing organised, liaising with a range of different sites some run in the owners spare time, but it is well worth the effort.
This isn't exactly a secret so why don't digital advertising agencies adopt the approach? It may sound cynical, but its probably down to their business model. If you can make a 5% margin on a 1 million spend with a major comparison site, that means 50,000 for little more effort than a few meetings and a proposal. When your sector's most popular discussion forum will charge 5k per year for a major sponsorship deal the 5% cut for the agency isn't going to pay the rent on their London offices and frankly its a lot harder work to set things up with a small web site owner than a major advertising portal.
Hard work but worth it
Its harder work but more than worth it because it doesn't just stop at the advertising. Handled properly a relationship can be built with site owners opening up a range of possibilities; sponsored events, favourable reviews, exclusivity, in context advertising, joint content development and the list goes on. To take full advantage of the possibilities you really need to be talking to a full service online marketing agency rather than a digital advertising setup who don't have access to the resources and skill sets needed. By way of illustration it would probably never occur to them that multiple links from high ranking web sites in your sector is absolutely excellent for boosting your own web site in the search ranks. If it did, it would probably also occur that this would reduce your need for advertising, but there's that cynicism coming in again.
When doing your own research in this area don't forget to look beyond your major keywords on Google as quite often this can be where the best opportunities can be found.
Can we help?
one on Google...
there are nine more web sites in the
top ten.