I recently sat in on a meeting the other day between one of my real estate clients and a local ad representative for a national news organization. Since their national website divides news in the different provinces, they were looking for local advertising to go a long with the content. My client had just recently agreed to a similar deal to do some online advertising for another local online news site. The real estate client was definitely willing to experiment with some more banner advertising. So I was pretty sure he was going to buy the ads and try them out.
The thing is though, a lot of these older traditional print marketing companies are not training these sales reps on the basics of online marketing. Granted the rep had a lot of stats, but couldn’t really explain them. Since the proposed banner ad was going to be run on impressions, we wanted to know what the average “Click Thru Ratio”(CTR) was. AKA if the ad is shown 100 times and one person clicks it, the ad would have a CTR of 1%. The CTR is very important because the ad could potentially be shown millions of times and would have no clicks. A waste of money in my opinion.
Well the rep didn’t know what CTR meant and to be honest most people don’t unless they have had experience in the marketing practice. Also they had yet to make any sales for these online advertisements so hopefully the learn from their mistakes. We explained as much as we could to the rep on how online marketing worked including some stuff about Google. Anyways this rep wanted $25 for 1000 impressions whereas we had been getting 1000 impressions for $1 with another very similar company. That meant this rep was 25 times more expensive.
The two news sites would be as close as you could possibly get to being the same thing. We decided to pass on the offer although we were asked to try it out for a month and buy $1000 worth. We mentioned that was at least double what we had been paying for Google ads and they are more targeted than banner ads. We have been managing to get 34 to 20 cents per click for banner ads which is comparable to Google. Anyways this just another example of how important it is to know what you’re selling and also what you are buying.
Some important terminology for online advertising:
CTR – Click Thru Ratio – How many times your ad was clicked given how many times it was shown.
Unique Visitors – How many unique people visit the site. More accurate indication of visitors than other stats that measure visits because they can be strewed by multiple page visits by the same user.
CPC - Your calculated cost per click. Impressions – How many times the ad would be shown.
Impressions - How many time the ad would be shown.
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