AdOnion

Earlier I wrote a post on Publisher: Planning To Increase Your Earning Next Year, so today I’m going to talk about the advertiser side to provide you with things to look for when advertising in this rough economic time. For advertisers, it might be beneficial advertising online during these rough times as consumers are going to the Internet to look for deals. Therefore with the right campaign designed for the rough times you can make use of the opportunity out there. Now a days more than ever advertisers are looking for both quality and quanity with their tight advertising dollars, during these rough times. While I’ve been talking with many advertisers providing suggestions and listening to their changes in marketing goals and objectives, I’ve combined all these information into the following hints and tips for all advertisers out there.

Here are some things you might want to think about when planning for your campaign:

• Be more flexible and think positive: I know that thinking positive maybe hard during the rough times as you have budget to reach, but thinking positive will help relieve stress and help you think and plan better. Step back, put yourself in different roles, such as your consumers and your company and see what have been overlooked during the good times. At this stage it is equally important to be flexible and open to all options and evaluate all options that can help your marketing goals.

AdOnion’s Tip for Advertisers: If  you need any help, you can always contact a network representative and ask if they have any new features rolling out. Or ask them about your marketing goals and see if they have some suggestions for you to carry out the plan that you may have overlook. At AdOnion we provide a variety of ways that you can contact us by using our contact form, email or live support.

• Planning/Setting your marketing goals: When planning marketing goals, many people will use the SMART approach which stands for S = Specific, M = Measureable, A = Attainable, R = Realistic, and T = Timely. Your marketing goals should have the following elements in order for you to come up with a plan, execute it and evaluate it accordingly.

AdOnion’s Tip for Advertisers: During the rough times your SMART goal setting would need to be tailor so it meets the economic situation today and not last quarter or last year. It is important to know how your industry is performing overall, how your competitors are doing and your own company’s performance in the last quarter and how it has changed and most importantly your or the economy’s anticipation of this current/next quarter. Remember your goal should be realistic to today’s economy and not last year. Setting a realistic goal will also provide employees motivation as they see that the company is reaching their goal and knowing that your company have a plan waiting to be executed and not sitting there and waiting.

• Designing your ad copy/creative: When you design the ad copy keep in mind that now everyone is on a tight budget, so use words that provide incentives such as free, you save $20, now only $1.99, limited time offer, buy 1 get 1 free, buy now and receive a free copy of a book etc. These words will appeal to all users who are surfing around the Internet looking for deals or not, they see these words and you’ll attract them to your site.

AdOnion’s Tip for Advertisers: When setting up a campaign is it always important to test with more than 1 creative, you should have several creatives with unique tracking to determine what works for you. It is very common to test, as the audiences for one network are usually different compared to another network so one ad copy will not work for everyone or every network.

In addition, when creating your ad copy make sure you tell the user what is it that you want them to do, whether it’s purchase, subscribe/sign up etc. A lot of creatives don’t tell the users what they are looking for, you only have a few seconds to tell the users what you are looking for before they move on. Make your ‘action items’ apparent to the users.

• Communication: It is important to establish good communication with your ad network, as it will help your campaign tremendously. Communicating clearly with your account representative about your marketing goal, how the campaign is performing, and what needs to be improve or what is done right at every stage of the campaign will help make your campaign more effective.

AdOnion’s Tip for Advertisers: At AdOnion we encourage a culture of communication, we believe that in order to provide you with what you are looking for we need your feedback no matter if it’s good or especially the bad ones. For us to be able to improve we will need to know where we can improve, sometime we may overlook factors which are important to you.  We offer different modes of communication such as our contact form, email or live support.

• Putting your ad copy to work: With an attractive ad copy now on hand, it is time to test the creative. I know right now testing doesn’t seem to sound right as advertisers are looking right away for conversions. But unless you work on a CPA basis all the other networks will require some testing before you know if it is the right fit. There are a of things you can look for when doing testing with an ad network in order to get the most result.  You can look for cost per click (CPC) options, so you are only paying when someone actually express interest in your offer by clicking on it and landing on your landing page. You can also narrow the campaign targeting to a specific geo-graphical region, keywords, and categories so you are reaching your targeted audiences.

AdOnion’s Tip for Advertisers: At AdOnion we offer CPC packages for both text and graphical banners at a fixed rate of $0.04 per click. We offer our advertisers to geo-targeting, broad keywords and categories match, daily spending caps, and a frequency cap up to 7 days. We also offer other campaigns on a fixed rate such as for graphical banners the fixed rate is $0.20 per thousand impressions, popunder with a fixed rate of $0.0025 per visit, and interstitial with a fixed rate of $0.0045 per interstitial. You can review our packages here.

• Know where your ads are displayed: With the rising demand of advertisers, many of the networks are able to provide a list (some may provide you with a partial list, just ask your account representative) of where your ads are displayed. Make use of these information, these are key information that can help with executing an effective campaign.

AdOnion’s Tip for Advertisers: At AdOnion we know the importance of providing you with all the necessary information to helping you make your campaign to succeed. Therefore, we do offer advertisers with full transparency, we have an advertiser marketplace with a list of publishers in our network so advertisers can purchase the ad zone on the specific website only providing you with more control over the campaign. You are also getting a more cost effective campaign as you are only displaying ads on websites that are highly targeted to your offer. To visit our marketplace, you can go here. In addition, if you want to advertise via our packages you are provided with a site list and you can block any sites at anytime. You can always contact us or email me and let me know what you are looking for and I can gather some websites for you to review.

• Monitoring/Optimizing the campaign: Once the campaign is up and running it is also important to monitor the camaign for their performances and optimize the campaign so that it is performing more effectively and increasing your ROI. You can use tools such as frequency caps or IP caps, daily limit, time parting, pixel codes or ROI codes to help optimizing the campaign.

AdOnion’s Tip for Advertisers: AdOnion provides advertisers with a variety of tools to help monitor and optimize the camaigns. We provide advertisers with a frequency cap of up to 7 days which means that within the 7 days no same IP will view your ads more than once, daily limit to help you control your spending, and reports. We provide you with a general report telling you about the impressions/click/spending per day and a site report with more information such as impressions/click/spending per site and the amount of conversions if pixel codes are used. We also provide the ROI codes for advertisers to place on their keypage(s) to monitor the page views, leads, sign ups and purchase, form these key indicators we are able to optimize your campaign according for a performing campaign which reaches your ROI code.

Well this concludes some of the tips I have for all the advertisers, this may sound familiar but a lot of people may forget a few steps or overlook a step. I hope that this post will be able to help you in achieving a successful campaign in this economic situation.

Wish you all a prosperous 2010!