Searching for
Clicks
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (SEPTEMBER 2003)
Book
publishers looking to brush up on their Internet marketing
tactics could have done worse than sit through sixteen
hours of pep talks and panels at the Jupiter/ClickZ
Online Advertising Forum on July 30-31 in New York
City. Sure, there were blindingly obvious insights —
72% of Internet users say pop-up ads make their skin
crawl, compared to 42% who feel the same way about TV
ads — and the whole Internet banner ad business is still
going down the tubes, though it will sink less this
year (6%, from $3.3 to $3.1 billion) than the 13% decline
of the past two years. One mini-trend worth noting:
“rich media” is hot. Click-through rates for these ads
(which move, burble, or make other attention-grabbing
gambits) are double those for static banner ads, though
dial-up users can’t get them. That should change this
year when broadband Internet access hits the critical
15% mark — upping the ante on what gets clicked.
But the biggest buzzword at the forum was “paid search”
advertising, which is due to be up 50% this year, and
Overture CEO Ted Meisel explained why.
“110 million Internet users are now doing four-plus
billion searches a month,” he said. “The average user
is conducting 35 searches a month, ten of which are
for something to purchase.” If a publisher wants to
advertise titles among search results — say, a London
travel guide that shows up when people search on the
keyword “London” — here’s how it works. Advertisers
bid at auction for ad placements around the search results
for specific keywords. Getting in on the action is cheap:
a keyword can be tested for $100, while the average
cost for a keyword on Overture is 40 cents, or $400
for 1,000 clicks. Most significantly, Meisel said the
average return on advertising spend for Overture was
$5.09. “Search will continue to grow dramatically for
several reasons,” he predicted. “Marketers will get
savvier. New technology will enable them to manage the
complexity of marketing at the SKU level, something
for which no tools have existed because it’s never been
possible before.”
Yet search isn’t everything, countered Martin Nisenholtz,
President and CEO of New York Times Digital.
“Only 13% of an average user’s time is spent searching,”
he chided. “If that’s all you’re focusing on, you’re
not doing advertising.” Hence the other buzzword at
the Crowne Plaza ballroom — “contextual advertising.”
This strategy has been touted as a way for publishers
“to make more revenue from advertising while maintaining
editorial quality,” and offers the ability to match
a publisher’s online content with search keywords. If
you have a web page for your London travel guide, for
instance, then relevant ads (say, an ad for a London
hotel) are automatically placed on your site. Two new
such programs are Google’s AdSense and Content
Match from Overture, while Primedia’s Sprinks
sells categories of pages, rather than individual pages,
in its network of sites.
Then there’s plain old email. A discussion headlined
“E-mail and Beyond: Interactive Direct Marketing Tactics”
grappled with the impact of spam on Internet marketing,
and Paul Soltoff, CEO of SendTec, warned:
“Be careful how quickly you agree to a do-not-send email
list. As it is, 15% of legitimate email is getting filtered
out. Look at your inactives to see if they are really
getting their mail.” All agreed that email remains the
most efficient way to keep in touch with — and keep
— your best customers. Take a page from Cosmetíque,
for example, which signed up more than 200,000 web site
visitors in 12 months for its cosmetics clubs.
We
thank New York-based freelance business writer Rich
Kelley for contributing this report.
©2003
Publishing Trends
