CYBERSPACE — Despite an overall decline in click-through rates during recent years, banner ads remain the bulwarks of online advertising. However, Overdrive founder and chief executive officer Harry Gold has devised a list of 10 other tactics marketers can use to increase their cost-per-click ratios and expand their branding efforts. He revealed them in an article at ClickZ.com.First on Gold’s list are text links. Although he admits they are “oldies but goodies,” he wrote they can be worth their weight in gold because typically one text-link buy runs across multiple site pages. Because they’re short — typically 65 or so characters — “the key is to squeeze something compelling into the limited amount of text you typically get,” he noted.
Similar are so-called “in-text” buys. Subtle but effective, in-text ads generally take the form of keyword sponsoring within networks or large, text-heavy sites. Amazon makes good use of the technique, popping up boxes containing some sort of rich-media content whenever a mouse rolls over any number of pages all over the Web. The pop-ups cost the advertiser nothing; instead, advertisers typically pay $2 to $4 per actual click.
Although most marketers are at least trying to bid their ways into Google’s search ads, Gold encourages them to check out other sites in Google’s network, as well. Google runs ads on all of its properties, and sometimes bidding on placement at Gmail or Google Docs can be much less expensive than paid-search placement.
And speaking of sponsored search results: If you’re segmenting search away from the rest of your advertising budge, Gold recommends you stop that. Search-engine optimization should be its own budget category, sure — but lumping search advertising in with the rest of the ad budget allows marketers to apportion per-click costs over a broader range of products.
Gold calls advertorial — advertising that looks and reads like a feature article — his “secret weapon.” Many sites are not accustomed to advertorial-style advertising but are willing to try it, he wrote. The caution here is to make sure the advertorial contains useful information. If it’s all hype and hyperbole, consumers will ignore it and you’ll have wasted your money.
Social networking feeds are another emerging place to put advertising. Because of the popularity of social-networking sites, ads there can be expensive, but buys often are available within the feeds that automatically update users’ pages or greet them when they log into their admin sections.
Gold also recommends sponsoring newsletters, but only newsletters that have room at or near the top of the page. Why? “These are great for a few reasons,” he wrote. “They tend to perform very well, you get a lot of real estate for copy, and they hang around for a long time in a person’s inbox driving clicks from weeks and sometimes months to come. Finally, they can easily be forward when people forward their newsletters.”
Application advertising is an emerging market Gold recommends marketers examine. In a nutshell, “you buy media in the huge and rapidly growing universe of Facebook applications, Google gadgets, and general widgets that people can add to their desktops,” he wrote. Standard ads include banners and buttons, but more developers are beginning to offer text ads in their feeds and skins, according to Gold.
Pre- and post-roll video ads are becoming more popular, but another type of video ad is beginning to attract attention, as well. So-call “in-video static” ads are small text or images that pop up at the bottom of a video’s screen and link to an advertiser’s message. YouTube has begun experimenting with the technique.
Finally, Gold encourages marketers not to overlook splash pages. Full-page or partial-page ads that occupy at least part of the window before the viewer ever gets to the content he intended to see are intrusive, but they work, according to Gold. If the user wants to go directly to the content, he can click on a “no thanks” or “close” link and do so — but he’s seen the message and may have been intrigued by it. “People say they hate these, but from a performance basis they have worked well for us,” Gold wrote. “They cannot be ignored, and if you deliver the right creative, offer or message they can get a very high click and action rate.”
