NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Repeat Visits Versus Clicks
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Repeat Visits Versus Clicks
Mark Montgomery (markm_at_virtualfranchise.com)
Mon, 25 Aug 1997 09:54:01 -0700 (MST)
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 09:41:25 +1200
To: online-ads_at_o-a.com
From: Richard Adams <radams_at_netlink.co.nz>
Subject: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> The Value of Awards
Greg Bulmash wrote
>I'd like to bring up a topic which has become of interest to me
>lately... Awards as a way of marketing your site.
Now, in the beginning (early '96), I was happy to get any award for my
little site. I wore the badges with pride and hoped against hope to get
Cool Site of the Day one day. Lately, it really seems to me that
awards that _seem_ like they'd be great are essentially meaningless in
terms of generating traffic.
It may be an oversaturation of Site of the Day genre, or it may be
that the boom in online advertising and link exchanges is consuming
more consumer time so less people spend time surfing based on
recommendations and more time based on ad clicks.
To-wit, my site was picked as the site to see for August 13th by the
WGN morning news. Off the link at their site, I have received to date
(according to my referrer logs) all of 9 visitors. Now, I can boast a
five-star rating from them (they actually use a different symbol, but
I got five out of five) and it's a nice medal for my chest, but in
terms of actual visitors, it seems to have had little impact.
I talked to one big site and they even named some _major_ awards they
had won that didn't impact their traffic significantly. The only one
they said made a real difference was Netscape's "What's Cool" page.
Now, when I actually have time to actively promote my site, I spend it
on trying to contact the print media because it seems that their
recommendations are a heck of a lot more meaningful and effective on
average.
I'm interested in points of view on this. Is it just me, or does
this jibe with your experience?
We have had some very positive experience with awards. One of our most
successful sites is the New Zealand Tourism Board site at
http://www.nztb.govt.nz This has won several awards and these have
increased our traffic substantially. In particular, the site has won
two awards from Yahoo. The first was a selection as a 'pick of the day'
during February. Since then we recevied a 'pick of the week' also from
Yahoo. Our traffic reports show that the level of traffic increased
fivefold (500%) during that week! This was directly attributable to the
Yahoo mention. The traffic generated was all from overseas which is
exactly whom we are targetting.
In our promotion of the site we do not focus on one particular channel
as it is difficult to predict the impact of exposure. Certainly we
target conventional press and have received mentions in many
international papers and publications, including the New York Times.
Our experience has been that promotion needs to be extended through as
many channels as possible. It is also useful to consider focused
channels that are particularly relevant to your site (for NZTB this
means submitting to travel awards sites and dedicated travel search
engines).
Receiving awards is no different to other types of promotion in that the
key factors are the size of the target audience (i.e. traffic thru the
award site), the appropriateness of the content and the level of
qualification of the target audience. The Yahoo example was fortunate
that the sheer size of the audience was enough to compensate for the
lack of pre-qualification.
The beauty and frustration of the Web is that you can never really quess
where your biggest publicity and business will come from. At the end of
the day you just have to test what works for your site and then invest
your resources in the areas that your testing suggests. But be careful,
you must continually be testing new ideas and mediums. Just because it
works doesn't mean that there is not a better way. Happy promoting.
Richard Adams
Account Director
Promotus Advertising, Wellington, New Zealand
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