Print Versus PPC Advertising Dollars

August 04, 2009 · by Dale Traxler

Experimenting With Print Ads - Again

As mentioned in my last post, we initially grew our business at abeadstore.com starting in 2002 using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising with Google and later Overture/Yahoo. In 2004, we started experimenting with print advertising as a way of reaching more of our target consumers. We gradually increased our ad spend with various publications as did all of our competitors, but last year when the economy hit a wall, we decided to eliminate print advertising altogether. Instead, we redirected those dollars into expanded online campaigns that were measurable. Result? Significantly increased traffic and revenue 12 months later.

You may be asking "_Why get back into print advertising at all"? The simple answer is still all about extending our reach and visibility. There are several hundred thousands loyal readers in our target market who read the 4-6 primary beading and jewelry making magazines each and every month. All of our major competitors are visible there, the ads have a shelf life of several months, and it is a great way to build your brand.

The *real answer * is buried somewhere in the analytics and this time, we hope to find out what that answer is.

PPC Ad Advantages

For an ecommerce business, there are many advantages to online PPC advertising over print advertising. It's more timely, more targeted, reaches an online audience more likely make purchase online, your ad spend is in your control at all times, no long term contracts, and many more. But, the single biggest advantages is the visibility it brings. You can track your results, down to the revenue received by keyword by referrer, and know exactly what your return on investment is.

We know if we spend $1000 on PPC advertising, we will receive a specific number of conversions at a very consistent average order size. Granted, this needs to be CONSTANTLY nurtured to ensure success, but we have achieved a very high level of consistency from our efforts. We do see seasonal differences in traffic and conversion rates of course, but again, you can plan for those and make adjustments as necessary.

Print Advertising Advantages

Our target buyer is primarily female and their age ranges from 19-70. A very big demographic difference, but they all like to bead and make jewelry. This means that we have use different channels and messages to reach and appeal to different segments of our target market. A good portion of the older part of our target market still depends on print publications and catalogs for their supplier information, while the younger buyers use Facebook & Google for research.

We know print advertising is an effective way to reach those target buyers and enhance our brand image. A good four color ad communicates about our business, our products, and our brand. That ad has a long shelf life and may be viewed dozens of times over its life by the same person and others. Without doubt, many readers go to our website and check out our stores.

We don't know if those visits lead to conversions. Do they check out your store when they are "buying" or just "browsing". Intuitively, we know we get new customers and sales from those ads, but though we've tried coupons and checkout surveys, we've never been able to pinpoint more than 5 or 10 sales to a specific print ad. Contrast that with the 50 or more sales we might get from spending the same amount online. But, we intuitively, we still know there is some payoff there.

A Missing Link?

As I was looking through our analytics and comparisons with 2007, I noticed that our direct traffic to our primary website at abeadstore.com was actually down by about 8-10% relative to 2 years ago. All of our other traffic sources are up 10-15% or more over that same period. Our hard core, repeat customer traffic has remained fairly consistent, so it was really bothering me about why our direct traffic was down that much.

It finally occured to me that we were all over the place in print advertising in the period that I was looking at. We had 1/4 page coverage in at least one print publication every month during 2007. And, every visit from a print ad during that year would have been registered as a "direct visit" in our analytics. We did not use any landing pages for the print ads at that time.

So, I decided to get back in the print game and see if we can measure things more effectively this time around.

Walk Before We Run

We will be doing this more methodically this time. Our first ad is going to be smaller and focused on abeadstore.com only. We will include a coupon offer and will be adding a checkout survey about how the buyer found us.

Next time around, we will run a slightly larger ad that includes a custom landing page for every print ad that will be targeted at the demographics of the potential buyer. Hopefully, we will have more visibility into the ad effectiveness! If we see measured success, we will gradually ad more publications back into the schedule.

The bad news about print is the lag time is horrible! We just sent in an ad that will finally hit the streets at the end of September. We will have already sent in the next ad before we know the success with the first one. Media companies have got to start reducing their turnaround cycles and the overhead involved in producing their publications. No wonder they are all in trouble right now.

We will share results once we are able to reach some conclusions. Undoubtedly, we will find something different than what we expect and need to make further adjustments.

Category: Evolving eBiz | Tags: Pay-per-click Advertising, Advertising, Social Media