Print is dead?
Some in publishing have been so bold as to suggest that print advertising (like print) is dead (heresy!), proselytizing that advertisers devote their entire budgets to online advertising. They say things like, “You can track everything online but not in print!” and “Online ads can move, print is static!” and “A newspaper ad is dead tomorrow. For the same price, an online ad can run all month!” They also say things like “No one reads print anymore!” They are dubious company for a book publisher. As a cog in a print and online media and events marketing company, I believe that both print and online advertising can work together. Here’s a primer on how to begin advertising online.
Reader safari
Go find your readers’ online digs. If you need some ideas, here are a few to consider:
- There’s a website for everything. In fact, there are probably a few of them. Grab a beer, put on some tunes, and spend an hour or two letting Google guide you through the most promising results for keywords that match your book’s content. Websites offer you lots of individual visitors. They are good for finding new customers in new or existing markets.
- There’s a forum for every topic, too. If there’s one thing Chris Anderson’s long tail theory nailed, it is that the Web brings together the strangest little niches of people. Somewhere online there is a preexisting community interested in your book. “Bulletin boards” or “community forums” were one of the first applications of the Internet. A forum is a website devoted to conversations about a particular interest. Conversations are sorted by specific topics, and any member of the forum can reply to a message or start a new topic or “thread.” Devoted enthusiasts might spend all day browsing a forum (aka “multitasking”). Forums accept advertising, and it’s often cheap. Forums offer you smaller numbers of individual visitors, but lots and lots of opportunities for them to see your ad. They make for good branding.
- Google offers Ad Planner, a service that reveals Web traffic for specific websites or audiences. As part of this function, Ad Planner can suggest websites that specific types of customers visit. For example, if you’re about to publish a book on football, you can load a pre-defined audience called “football fan” and Google will reveal which websites they visit. Many of these will, of course, be mainstream sites like AOL or Yahoo!, but dig deeper and you’ll find niche sites that require less ad budget. You can also build a custom audience using various demographic criteria, or you can type in sites you know are on target for your market and Ad Planner will suggest similar sites.
- Most magazines have a companion website.
- Most events, like trade shows, have a website.
- There’s a trade association for everything under the sun.
While you’re perusing these websites, pay attention to the ads that are there. What ads get your attention? What positions on the page do those ads occupy? Do those ads run everywhere on the site (“run-of-site”) or in specific departments?
Websites will typically offer a suite of possible ad types and positions. Ads can be banners (something rectangular and horizontal), towers or skyscrapers (rectangular but vertical), boxes or buttons (roughly square), pop-ups (squarish and highly irritating), text ads, or something unique.
Now that you’ve built a list of websites that appeal to your potential reader, let’s get shopping. Look for an “Advertise with us” link or the “media kit.”
Media kits are not really for the media
A media kit is a brochure that contains information about a publication and its readers. A good media kit includes reader demographics, advertising prices (the “rate card”), specifications for its ads, an editorial calendar, and good photos of a mountain range or an athlete or a kitchen, or whatever best represents the audience the publication is trying to reach. Download it and read it.
Your website of choice may not have a media kit. “Contact us!” it will say, and it will include fields for your name, email address, phone number, and reason for writing. While your suspicion that no one will ever get back to you is justified, your reason for writing should be this: “I’m interested in advertising on yourwebsite.com. Please email me more information.” If you can, avoid giving your phone number; you want to be well informed before you speak to an ad rep.
The information you’re trying to get from the media kit or the ad rep is this:
- How many people visit the website? (unique visitors)
- How many times are those people likely to see your ad? (page views)
- What’s it gonna cost ya?
Warning sign: Either you’re dealing with amateurs who don’t want to tip their hand, or you’re dealing with pros who don’t want to tip their hand too soon.
Here is where opportunity knocks…
Every self-respecting website on earth is running some kind of analytics code that tracks how many people are visiting, and it’s probably Google Analytics. Conveniently for you, Google Ad Planner taps into Google Analytics and Google Search data to compile an estimate of total web traffic for many websites. It only takes about 5,000 unique visitors per month to start showing up on Ad Planner’s radar, and let’s be honest—would you really advertise on a site with less traffic? So go snoop about Ad Planner and see how much traffic Google thinks your target website gets. Remember that this is an estimate and is likely to underreport.
Since you know every site has analytics code running, you can ask them for it. In most Web browsers, select “View” and “Source” to see the source code for any Web page you visit. Scroll to the bottom and look for “google-analytics.com” in the code. There are other analytics providers, too (Webtrends, StatCounter, ecommStats), so if you don’t see that code, don’t despair. Find an ad rep on the website. If no rep is listed, try the publisher. Email them something like this: “I’ve reviewed your media kit, and I don’t see much information on Web traffic. I see that you’re running Google Analytics. Would you please send me last month’s visitor report?” You’ll be surprised how many websites are willing to do this.
Haggle like a camel trader
In the best-case scenario, you’re now familiar with the website, its readers, ad positions and sizes, pricing, and traffic. It’s time to get down to nickels and dimes: what’s this ad gonna cost ya? After all, if all the great things the Web offers are free, advertisers must be paying out the nose, right? The Web, in all its customizable glory, has many pricing schemes. The most common are:
- CPM (cost per mille or cost per impression): You pay X dollars per 1,000 impressions. Ad reps may spin CPM as “per 1,000 people that see your ad,” but that’s untrue. Just because your ad loads into a browser doesn’t mean the website visitor saw it. And just because your ad loaded 1,000 times doesn’t mean 1,000 unique visitors did the loading. CPM pricing is most common on highly visited websites.
- CPC (cost per click): You pay X amount per clickthrough. There is usually no limit on the number of impressions. Google’s AdWords program uses a version of CPC pricing.
- Flat rate: You pay X amount for your ad to run for X period of time. You get as many impressions and clickthroughs as you get. Flat-rate pricing is more common in forums and some lower-traffic websites and it’s typically first-come, first-served.
Don’t feel that because online advertising is trackable that the ad rates are nonnegotiable. It’s true that online advertising seems less negotiable than print advertising, which has a notorious reputation for infidelity to the rate card, but ad reps have two ways they can meet you halfway. First, they can “overdeliver.” If Web traffic is particularly strong in any given month, the website might have more impressions than paying advertisers. In that case, ad reps will decide which clients will receive the overflow—for free. You’ll usually learn about overdelivery at month’s end, but it doesn’t hurt to ask the ad reps during negotiation if they are expecting to overdeliver this month.
Another tactic is to play for sympathy. Erudite people love the idea of books. Explain that book publishing is a low-margin business and ask the reps if there are ways they can help. Offer them a copy of the book, especially if this is an enthusiast website. You can also gamble on pricing by showing them your hand early. Tell the reps you have X dollars available and ask what inventory they have available. Obviously, the dollar figure you quote should be well under the ad rep’s asking price and what you actually have budgeted.
Finally, you can try to book ad space at the last minute, just a day or two before the beginning of the next month. Much like car salespeople, ad reps have sales goals to meet.
Pricing will vary by ad format and position. Big, beautiful banners in prime real estate at the top of the home page, for example, will cost more than smaller buttons stashed several mouse scrolls down the page.
Let’s say you’re in the market for a nice, book-friendly 300 × 250 pixel square in the middle of the home page. The ad rep quotes you a price of $25 CPM. What the heck does that mean?
That means you’ll pay $25 per 1,000 impressions. If the site gets 10,000 impressions in a month, you will pay $250. If the site gets 100,000 impressions, you’ll pay $2,500.
Here are the formulas to calculate CPM, impressions, and your cost:
- Your cost in dollars = (# impressions / 1,000) × CPM
- # impressions = (your budget / CPM) × 1,000
Part 1: You pay for what you get
You can tell the ad rep that you want to buy a block of 10,000 impressions. At $25 CPM, you have committed to an ad spend of $250. This would be a very reasonable thing to do. The only problem is...very few people pay attention to online ads.
We humans are great at ignoring things, and so you need many people to have the opportunity to pay attention to your ad. Naturally, publications are wary to release information on clickthrough rates. Some online advertising industry estimates are that clickthrough rates are considered strong in the range of .08 to .11%. That means roughly one-tenth of one person for every one hundred people will click on your ad.
(The human ability to ignore is why print advertising is still useful. Print publications seduce people into a reading mood during which they will tolerate [even enjoy!] reading well-designed ads. Most websites force people to scan for the information they want.)
So you’ll either need to buy a lot of impressions or make ad creative that is so eye-catching and compelling that it is irresistible (or both). It’s wise to take the book trailer approach: advertise the benefits or the experience of reading your book rather than a photo of the bound book itself. This is why online ads have gotten so distracting with mouseovers, flashing lights, talking heads, and video.
Why advertise in this environment?
Part 2: You can measure effectiveness
Marketing professionals take it on faith that marketing works. We’re delighted on those rare occasions we can prove how good a job we’re doing. Online advertising is one of those occasions.
Since the Web is an unending database, it’s unendingly trackable. It’s possible for highly engineered companies like Google to know 75% of the websites I’ve visited in any given day (in part because I use Google so heavily). Individual websites boast even more capability; they can follow your every mouse click through their entire website. When a user visits a website, they are assigned a small piece of uniquely identifiable code (a “cookie”) that the website reads on this and future visits. If that user is among the one-tenth of one person in 100 who clicks on an online ad, that click is recorded. The ad will direct the user to another website, which will detect what site sent the user. More sophisticated e-commerce websites will add their own cookie so that they are able to track how much a visitor spends. In other words, advertisers with the right software can directly attribute revenue (and individual transactions!) to specific ad campaigns. Now that is trackability!
Unfortunately, not all publishers have e-commerce websites and not all e-commerce websites have robust Web analytics that integrate with their shopping cart software. Fear not: there are ways to track your ad campaigns.
How to track ad campaigns
Any self-respecting website you advertise on should happily send you a monthly impression and clickthrough report and a campaign summary. In fact, you should make this a requirement just before you sign the contract with your ad rep. But who wants to wait until the end of the month to see how your campaign is performing?
Once you’ve successfully bought your ad campaign, you’ll submit your online ad to your ad rep along with a destination URL. The destination URL is where you want website visitors to go when they click on your ad. You can make this any URL you want: your home page, a product page on your website, your author’s blog, your page on Facebook, an Author Central page on Amazon, a landing page custom-made for this ad campaign, etc.
If you choose to send traffic to your website, you can get real-time statistics on your ad campaign’s performance in several ways. Most basically, you, your IT manager, or your Web host can check your server logs for spikes in traffic to your campaign’s destination page. If you have Google Analytics installed on your website (you should), you can easily check on performance without the IT department’s eye-rolling and can learn a lot more about where traffic is coming from and ending up.
You can even detect traffic from individual campaigns by customizing the destination URL you provide to your ad rep. Here’s how this works:
A non-customized URL looks like this:
http://www.velopress.com
I can customize it by adding a “?” to the end of the URL. The “?” allows me to then add anything—anything at all—after it. Like this:
http://www.velopress.com/?kentwatsonlikesbeer
The customized URL will work in the same manner as the non-customized URL except in one way: your server will see that someone visited “http://www.velopress.com/ ?kentwatsonlikesbeer” instead of “http://www.velopress.com.” Now I can check my server logs or Google Analytics traffic report and look for the custom URL. Any traffic the custom URL gets is directly attributable to the ad campaign for which I provided this custom URL.
Let’s say you decide to advertise with two different ad formats in two different ad positions on a website. With this hack, you can assign each unique URLs so that you can compare their performance.
There is one situation in which the “?” hack doesn’t work: when a website is already employing the same hack. In other words, if the destination URL already has a “?” like this: “http://www.velopress.com?id=232” then adding a “?” after “232,” will show an error message. In this case, add “&utmref=” instead like this:
http://www.velopress.com/triathlon.php?id=288&utmref=kentwatsonlikesbeer
These two hacks work almost everywhere. They are harmless, entirely legal, and extremely useful for marketers promoting books online.
Was it worth it?
Many marketers also take on faith that advertising is worth it. The trackability of online advertising helps justify itself, but it’s not without flaws. You can’t, for example, track sales from customers who clicked on your ad but then decided to buy the book in a bookstore or at Amazon.
So online advertising still requires some faith. Isn’t that true of all promotion and publishing?
This article appeared in the PubWest EndSheet No. Three (fall 2009)
Dave Trendler is Marketing and Publicity Manager for VeloPress, an endurance sports and fitness publisher. Dave has run over 2,000 online ads. His best long-term clickthrough rate is .99%. Please leave Dave’s server log a “&utmref=” message at davetrendler.com.
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