Re: What a long strange trip it's been

From: Clint Ballard <clint_at_accelerationsw.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 08:06:56 -0500 (CDT)

SANFORD CARR WROTE:
> It would be nice to have some hard data about an isolated
> campaign with a unique domain URL that was promoted only on
> banners. But since most of us are using every avenue
> available to drive traffic to our sites, it's not likely to
> happen.
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I have registered a domain name specifically for this
purpose and ran a banner campaign that prominently featured
the URL on the right and left side of the banner. The
results were as follows:

Impressions 40,000
Clickthroughs 964 (2.41% CTR)

Subsequent Bookmark Visits: 32 (still continues to bring in traffic)
Subsequent Manual Visits: 33 (all within 1 week after campaign
ended)
Branding Value after 4 weeks: 65 spontaneous visits

Since the ONLY branding value to an online business are the
spontaneous repeat visits, this experiment shows that there
is minimal value to showing the URL and the larger effect is
from people bookmarking the destination page. The traffic
from Manual visits after the first week completely stopped,
eg. none, while the Bookmark visits are still bringing
traffic in. I don't know how much longer it will, but the
rate that it is decaying indicates that it will bring in 100
cumulative visits over a year. Thefore, the combined
branding value for the 40,000 impressions and 964
clickthroughs is a projected 133 spontaneous visits.
Boosting the CTR by around 13%. Of course, this assumes 100
more clickthroughs will come in. In the past, I predicted
that this branding effect would be about 10%, so it
correlates with what my intuitive feeling was. Objectively
speaking the CTR has been boosted by 6.7% in the first 4
weeks after the campaign.

Of course, the value to a company with significant offline
sales, eg. Fortune 500 companies, the branding value can be
enormous. Not only do they have the deep pockets to run
these campaigns, it is highly profitable for them. For
example, if Coke ran a billion impression banner campaign
that influenced ten million people to buy an extra Coke per
month, the incremental profits from this campaign would be
$10,000,000 (assumes $1 of profits per dozen Cokes) That's
$10 CPM of branding value. Of course, the results I used
for the Coke campaign are purely speculative and is probably
on the high side, eg. 1% "conversion", but a soft drink
maker does not have a significant online benefit. Large
companies can get meaningful branding value from banner (or
other) online campaigns and if they can combine a direct
response value, eg. online sales, the overall ROI can be
increased significantly.

Coincidentally, I have a web page that gets over 3 million
unique visitors per month (about 5% of the active Internet
population) and I am looking for clients that would benefit
from a hybrid branding/direct response campaign. Rather than
charge by CPM's or even clickthroughs, I want to do this on
an online conversion basis at a reasonable price, so I will
take on all the risk. I have a theory about the proper way
of branding online (hint: it is different from TV!) and I am
willing to put my money where my theory is :)

Clint Ballard
mailto:clint_at_accelerationsw.com
http://www.downloadsales.com and http://www.clicksales.com


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Received on Tue Apr 06 1999 - 09:12:30 CDT