UKNM: Cost of bringing in visitors/less is more

[nick berry]

Martin,


I couldn't agree more with your comments on banner advertising - it can be

highly cost effective when it comes to customer acquisition. The key is

flexibility and buying the right sort of campaign. In our network we have

two sorts of campaign;  campaigns targeted at small niche sites at CPMs up

to �20, and larger 'megadeals' (forgive the cheese) on larger special

interest sites (with 2+m impressions) a month that work out at around �3

CPM. Both are effective, but work differently for different advertisers.

People should shop around until they get the CPMs and audience they want.


However, creative need not be 'a matter of luck' as you suggest. The key to

excellent creative is testing. How else do you know what works until you

have shown it to people ? We know this because we have had an excellent

response to our facility that allows people to buy campaigns with multiple

banners from as little as �5. They get to test different creatives until

they find one that they are happy with (even if they then place campaigns

elsewhere).


I'm sure Flycast are Ok, but the problem with large ad networks is that you

have to spend more up front when, as you say, often the less you spend the

better !


yours


nick



Nick Berry

Marketing Manager

AdvertWizard - 'Internet Advertising Made Easy'

nick [dot] berryadvertwizard [dot] com

Tel: +44 (0) 208 591 1125 ext 223  mob: 07715 748894


www.advertwizard.com

AdvertWizard is a free website promotion service that makes internet

advertising easy, instant and effective for businesses of any size



----- Original Message -----

From: "Martin Lloyd" <

martindomino [dot] com

>

To: <

uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

>

Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2001 9:12 AM

Subject: RE: UKNM: Cost of bringing in visitors



I've run a couple of campaigns that got 20% + click throughs, and have heard

of a few more. They all had a few things in common, and I think these things

tend to explain why most banner ad campaigns have such a high cost of

aquisition


1 : Right place. In all these 98cases the ads were in exactly the right

place,

keyword searches on search engines or niche sites.


2 : Right creative. Unless you've got the budget / time to do lots of

testing getting 'perfect creative' is a matter of luck. Good copywriters and

designers will usually do a decent job, but Caples comment about one

headline outpulling another by nineteen times is very true online.


3 :Small audience - and this is the killer. For most products once you've

found the 'perfect audience' that always clicks on the banner and often

converts you discover its pretty small. Every time you aim to grow your

reach you move away from this perfect audience and end up with worse

targeting and worse response to your creative.


All the 'successful' campaigns I mention above had budgets under �5000,

attempts to roll them out further stalled when an increase in reach

dramatically slashed click through rates and led to a correspondingly high

cost of sales.


On a related noe does anyone have experience of Flycast? They were

suggesting they could achieve a 2% ctr at �5 cpm which seemed like about the

right price for banners to me.



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