JEREMY SWINFEN GREEN <SWINFEN_at_EASYNET.CO.UK> WRITES:
>just as traditional brand advertisers are starting to realise the
>importance of direct relationships with consumers, so direct
>advertisers are starting to realise the importance of
>branding. Why shoudn't the same be true on the internet?
>
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Jeremy makes a point that I have been making for almost
two years. Just because you are looking for an action doesn't
mean you want to ignore the benefits of branding. Indeed the
action itself can help you to brand. If you get people to go to
your site then your site should be branding you far more than
any strip of graphic can do on its own.
The issue of branding with Banners has come home to me in
a most unexpected way in the last week and I would like to
share this with you.
Safe-Audit now has 18,000 members but is still growing like
topsy. In revenue terms we grow 20% month on month as we
have done since we launched. We were currently getting 1,800
new member registrations every month (in the main from
personal recommendation) which of course was feeding that
growth. Several of our larger long term advertisers have been
pressing us to grow their volumes still faster. We had a small
pay per action campaign running for Safe for a long time but
that was generating a very small number of new members. So
we decided to run a new campaign based on CPM.
Each banner carried our URL safe-audit.com and we offered
it to our run of network. The campaign started only last Friday
and the way Safe works means that the traffic builds up as
members decide to host the campaign. So it is early days
but the fact that branding was having a significant impact
became very clear within days. After 5 days this campaign
has close to a thousand site hostings. The CTR at the moment
is only about one third of a percent. Worse still the conversion
rate from click to registration is only 19 per mille. We actually
track the movement and time spent on each page for each
visitor within the target site by member referrer so we can tell
exactly the quality of the traffic which each member delivers
for each campaign.
We had a budgeted member acquisition cost of $5. Yet on
the face of the numbers it appears that it is actually costing us
$17 to acquire a member with this campaign. If this campaign
was being run by one of our advertising clients we would be
thinking about ways to change it or even recommending the
client to cease the campaign.
But something else is at work here. Since Friday when we
began the campaign our average number of new members
per month (pro rata) has increased by 1,200 per month to
3,000 per month (far above the numbers of recorded
registrations directly from the banner). There can be no
other reason for this increase and if we take those numbers
the cost per acquisition is entirely satisfactory.
So it appears that many people are either visiting the site and
coming back at a later time to register. Or they are seeing the
banner and noting the URL and visiting at a later stage. Either
way (or perhaps both) the end result is cost-justifying the
campaign because some degree of branding is happening.
I agree this is very short term branding but I have every
confidence that there is also a long term effect which will
make itself apparent in time. But to me this is proof positive
that banners (and site visits) can brand.
18,000 member host sites and 250 Million impressions a month
Tracking the quality of visit. Advertising with guaranteed results.
http://safe-audit.com mailto:leo@global-m.com +44181 346 0770
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Received on Wed Feb 17 1999 - 08:32:14 CST
