10 Places to Diversify Your Online Ad Budget in 2010
As the New Year approaches, you might be reflecting on how you spent your marketing budget in 2009, and what you might change in 2010. Chances are you’ve spent some of it with Google Adwords, and maybe even Yahoo! Search Marketing and/or Microsoft AdCenter. After all, search marking is a critical first step of online ad buys. But with only 5 percent of pages views on the web come from search, there is likely some room to get a better ROI by diversifying your online ad strategy.
There are three incentives for running campaigns on a variety of networks:
- First, you can reach new audiences, which means better targeting.
- Second, running on many networks can offer lower costs-per-conversion because campaigns can be targeted on more of a niche-basis.
- Finally, you can get more out of each ad dollar spent because running campaigns cross several networks lets you determine which messages perform best with which audience. This allows you to optimize your campaigns on a network-by-network basis.
In a nutshell, advertisers should look at other ways of approaching ad buys in 2010: via social media and niche-based networks. Depending on your business model, either one (or both) of these approaches can represent a wealth of untapped traffic and new customers.
5 Social Media Ad Networks
The real value social networks offer advertisers is the ability to precisely target ads. You see, when users use social networks, they provide a wealth of data about themselves — their interests, demographics, etc. As an advertiser, you can tap into this data to set-up campaigns and target users in a variety of ways. Here’s an overview of five of the more well-known social media ad networks; each offers dynamic ways to buy advertising and acquire potential customers.
Facebook Ads: By advertising through Facebook Ads, you can target users with a variety of criteria, including age, location, gender, and education, as well as with targeted keywords. Facebook Ads are mostly text-based and have a maximum limit of 135 characters, but you can also include a small image. You also have a choice between buying ads either on a CPM or CPC basis.
StumbleUpon Ads: Through StumbleUpon, you can target a pre-determined number of users according to their interests, as well as other criteria such as location, gender, and age. StumbleUpon lets users discover new content/websites based on their preferences. Users hit a “stumble” button and are shown sites at random that fit those preferences, the user then gives the as a thumbs-up or -down, and an algorithm tries to figure out their personal taste. When advertising through StumbleUpon, however, you want to ensure that your landing page is appropriate for the audience you’re targeting. If it’s not, enough users might vote it down that you won’t get your money’s worth in “stumbles.” To help you along StumbleUpon provides metrics on how many users like/dislike your landing page, and provides you with user reviews of your landing page. This lets you adjust your campaigns to suit the StumbleUpon user base you are trying to target.
LinkedIn Direct Ads: For targeting business professionals few ad networks offer the quality or database that LinkedIn does. Through LinkedIn Direct Ads, you can reach a worldwide audience of over 50 million professionals and target them according to location, industry, job title, and company size. Ads are also available on either a CPC or CPM basis. You should be aware, though, that this isn’t the most affordable network. For example, CPMs in some ad categories can reach $50 or higher, and although rich media placements are available, they are restricted to advertisers with budgets of $25,000 and up.
MySpace MyAds: Through MySpace MyAds you can “hyper-target” MySpace users with banners ads on either a CPC or a CPM basis. Hyper-targeting means that you use criteria such as gender, age, location, education, interests, hobbies, and parental status. Also, since MySpace MyAds is part of the FOX Audience Network, you can take your campaigns beyond MySpace and reach out to users on other Fox-owned content sites.
Sponzai: This is the latest network from Izea,, a social media marketing company. Sponzai is a bit different than traditional media buying networks in that it lets you proactively connect with a blogger’s audience by posting guest posts on their sites. Essentially, you write a potential guest post, upload it to the system, and indicate how much you’re willing to pay to have it featured on a targeted blog. Then bloggers review your content and price, and make a decision whether or not to place your post. The interesting thing about Sponzai is that you don’t only get eyeballs, but the ability to actually interact with someone’s audience and contextual backlinks.
5 Alternative PPC Ad Networks
When diversifying your online ad campaigns, you don’t necessarily have to go into completely new territory. You can also stick to conventional ad-buying models/networks.. There are a number of these traditional, auction-based ad networks that let you buy ad real-estate in a more conventional way — i.e. on a variety of content sites that belong to the networks as publishers. Some of them can even help you target users on high profiles sites that just aren’t available through Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Ask Sponsored Listings: Although this search engine isn’t as big as Google or “BingHoo,” it’s focused on specific verticals, making it an opportune network for certain advertisers. It also features publishers such as Excite, Mamma, and Dogpile, not to mention other lifestyle and technology sites, such as CNET.com. Just like on it’s larger, search engine counterparts, here advertisers bid on ad placements via a CPC model. Ask Sponsored Listings claims a reach of over 70 million unique users.
AOL Advertising: Acquired by AOL over two years ago, this ad network was formerly known as Quigo AdSonar. On it, advertising is sold on a contextual basis, and advertisers bid on a placement through a CPC model. Rich media placements are also available, and AOL’s sponsored listings let advertisers reach users through sites such as ABC.com, CNN Money, The Washington Post, AOL Money and Finance, and FOX News.
Marchex Adhere: (aka IndustryBrains) Through Marchex Adhere, you can buy ads on either a call- or click-basis. The verticals you can bid on include business, finance, real estate, IT, and HR. You can also buy site-specific placements with publishers like BusinessWeek, PC World, The Globe and Mail, and Kiplinger.com. Although the familiarity of their keyword-targeted placements might appeal to you more, Marchex’s real strength is in their site-specific targeting.
Pontiflex: This is more of a Cost Per Lead (CPL) marketplace than an ad network. While there isn’t a roster of publishers per se, Pontiflex offers a technology that lets you access the entire CPL marketplace. This technology can even help you manage non-Pontiflex campaigns. The Pontiflex CPL network is available through the AdLeads and AdUnitX platforms, and some of publishers using the technology include such notable sites as Pandora, Monster, and Admob.
MIVA: (aka Findwhat) Acquired by the performance-based advertising network Adknowledge in March 2009, MIVA was once known as e-Spotting and FindWhat. Their Precision Network is intended for targeting specific verticals, and MIVA also has a network of thousands of sites available for sponsored placements. Without setting up an account as an advertiser, however, it’s difficult to get information on the specific sites and publishers in their network.
Before the Leap of Faith
Search marketing is an important first step in online advertising because it can deliver the volume you need to determine your average cost per conversion. Without that data, you can neither determine whether a network is worth advertising with, nor calculate how much to invest in such a campaign.
If you’re running big campaigns, automated tools like Shoemoney Tools or, on the enterprise level, SEM software like Acquisio SEARCH can help get the most out of the primary PPC channels. They both offer PPC bid management tools that are good for managing the keywords of many campaigns.
Then, you have to make sure that a network’s pricing model fits with your business model. Ad models can range for from CPC to CPM to CPA, and you need to decide in advance which are most appropriate for your goals. Finally, test a few small campaigns before fully launching a campaign across a new channel. This will help you both measure the value of the traffic and optimize your campaigns around that traffic before you go all out.
Auld Lang Syne
Because of the weakened economy and how user behavior has evolved over the last two years, online advertisers should consider diversifying their media buys in 2010. Not only will it better insulate them from sudden shifts in the market, but it will let them target campaigns with much more accuracy and see greater returns.
Advertisers need to look for criteria identifying their users beyond a mere search term. They can find this through either niche-based networks or social networks. While social networks let you target users according to a variety of strong interests, niche-based networks help you reach users on the basis of one strong interest.. Either way, advertisers should be exploring ways to dynamically target users even when they’re not actively looking for your products and services.
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