Offline Advertising To Boost Online Traffic – Does it work? (8)
Offline Advertising To Boost Online Traffic – Does it work?
I had an interesting chat with Mr.Green couple days ago and somehow we ended up talking about offline ads (radio/TV/Newspaper ...) and how much they can actually influence the traffic of online projects. Since I managed the ad campaigns for 2 large online projects not so long ago, I have some experience with this, so let me share it with you.
BASIC SUMMARY
In both cases I had a pretty large budget and it was up to me to decide what I would to do with it. One of the project was a real estate portal, the other one was a country wide distributor of “bedroom stuff” - mattresses, beds … The goal of the real estate portal was to raise traffic levels and also get the attention of realtors, who would be willing to put their portfolio on the portal. The “bedroom stuff” distributor wanted to start an e-shop and promote their “brick&mortar” business at the same time. They had 12 branches open across the country when I launched the campaigns, and opened 10 more during the process.
PROJECT no.1 : REAL ESTATE PROJECT
Let's start with the real estate portal : obviously, the first thing I did was to launch google adwords campaigns, facebook posts boosts, local ad networks etc .. this is all online advertising that is not interesting in this context. Once all of this was running, I started to look around to get some offline ads going.
1.A Local Newspaper : The first thing I did was order a few ads in locally distributed advertising newspapers with real estate sections – you know that kind that is dropped into people mail boxes for free. I picked 3 publications, all of them based in a large city – one in western part of the country, one in the south and one in the east – in order to cover the whole country more or less. Each of them was published once a week in the following amounts: 65 000 copies (west), almost 50 000 copies (south) and 45 000 copies for the last one (east).
The format I picked was page-wide strip at the top of the page, cca 5 cm in height – black&white + red domain name. The text (angle) used the “local” approach, so something like : “1000's of properties in “YourCity” region”. These were pretty cheap and I got almost 50% discount for longer orders, so I ordered 3-6 months of distribution straight away. Once they started to rotate, we could see a small increase in traffic, but considering the investment … this was a failure. The traffic increase was really small, 100+ visits per day.
1.B Magazines : Next thing I did, was booking a few larger half-page ads in “good living” style of magazines. Prices of such AD's are already pretty high, so I didn't book many. The number of copies distributed for the same price, was actually way lower than in the first example. I used 3 magazines again, all distributed across the country, but only with about 20.000 copies per distribution. The result was very poor too in terms of traffic, it only produced a few visits – It was almost not visible in stats (20-50 visits per increase day max). So another failure.
1.C Radio + Local Transportation : I didn't want to give up just like that tho, so I went for something different this time. We became the “sponsor” of the weather forecast on a state-wide radio station (no.4 on the market with 9% market share which equals to 350 000 listeners) and I also paid for a few AD's on the back of the buses of one local transportation company (5 inter-city buses crossing my own region on a daily basis – 600.000 inhabitants). The radio campaign ran for 3 weeks, the buses were carrying our ads for 3 months. The result? Radio brought some visits when the forecast aired, but buses brought almost no change in traffic at all.
Project 1. Summary : At this point I stopped my experiments with offline ads for this project and started to analyze what happened. I found out, that people are not very likely to respond quickly to offline ads and they simply won't run to their computers to check the site out. I need to add, that the more the smartphone penetration grows and 3G connection get's better, the results will most likely improve too.
I also found out that the visitors gained through offline advertisement are more loyal than those you get through online methods. I think that when someone takes the time to either memorize the URL or retypes it, they are more likely to visit again. It was also visible in stats pretty nicely – when a print campaign started, the traffic increase lasted for a rather long time. But when I turned an online ad campaign off, the traffic was gone immediately.
The Unexpected Side Effect : But the most interesting and beneficial was one unexpected side effect that these offline campaigns had. They literally multiplied the interest of realtors and advertisers. Seeing our ads in related magazines and newspapers, as well as hearing our ads in the radio, gave our portal the needed credibility and feel of a quality product. Where we had a problem to get the realtors even give us a try for free, they were now coming on their own, willing to pay this time. So even tho these offline campaigns didn't help us much in terms of traffic, they helped us to get more advertisers and they dramatically improved our revenue too.
PROJECT no.2 : BEDROOM STUFF DISTRIBUTOR
The “bedroom stuff” e-shop came after this real estate project, so I already knew what to expect in a way. This project was a bit different tho, because the company also had brick&mortar shops running across the country. This way, I had an advantage actually, because I didn't have to promote just the online part. I could also navigate the people to the nearest shop, which I also did.
2.A - Radio Again : We also used the radio station approach, but this time, we sponsored a radio competition and supplied a few mattresses as prizes 
To immediately increase the traffic of the e-shop – people had to visit the site, look-up something on it and enter it in a box along with their email address. This way we also collected some leads. The response was pretty good, traffic went up significantly, but since it was “incentivized” it had almost no effect on sales.
Many people entered the competition and we ended up with more than 4000 email leads. However, as always, leads collected based on some incentive are pretty poor, we didn't turn profit on this, but it helped us to cover part of the advertising costs. Since we also collected some personal data, I learned one more thing from this, females on maternity respond to these competitions the best
2.B - Magazines : We ran ads in several printed media, both local and state wide ones, none of them brought in significant traffic, the results were very similar to the “real-estate example”. But again, the side effect saved the campaign – the ads drove up the revenue generated by the brick&mortar shops.
Side Effect Again - This Time An Expected One
Sales people at the shops were instructed to ask the customers how they found out about the shops and it turned out that we actually grabbed the interest of many of them with the offline ads. During 2 months that we measured this, almost 20 % of customers confirmed that they found out about the shops as a result of the offline ads we have run. Majority of these people also visited the website (whopping 80%), browsed the products, but decided to go directly to a branch instead of ordering online.
CONCLUSION
Both examples have one thing in common, in neither of them did we reach a significant increase of website traffic, but in both cases, some effect was there – we increased the BRAND awareness significantly. I found out that offline ads still carry a bigger weight in the eyes of some people – they probably believe newspapers or radio ads are only ran by bigger and better funded operations. The e-shop example on the other hand, showed us that offline ads can work well in combination of an online and offline type of approach. My bet is that people who respond better to offline ads are more hesitant to shop online in the first place so they are still naturally drawn to brick&mortar branches.
Anyone has a similar experience? Or maybe a totally different one, I'd like to hear it.
Thanks for reading!
Very interesting read Matuloo! Really awesome.
What method did you use to determine the traffic increase came from a certain source? i.e. how did you know that the uptake of +100 visitors a day was because of the newspaper ad and that ads on the bus didnt generate anything whereas radio ads did? I'd love to hear more in detail how you measured the specific impact that each ad had on the amount & quality of visitors on the site.
I used to work for nearly one year at Vistaprint before founding Addiliate and we did a lot of TV advertising as well (offline) to attract visitors to our only sales channel, being vistaprint.com (online). In the TV ad we put a shortURL saying the name of the channel e.g. www.vistaprint.nl/rtl4
The amount of traffic and sales we got on these short URLs brought in about 10% of the total amount we spend on the TV ad, so the direct return on that was hugely negative. On the other hand, the increase in all the other channels and especially organic traffic was massive. Also we planned a lot of big email shoots right after the airing on TV and the open rate, CTR and CR were significantly higher than the same campaign/subjectline/creative/landing page used on the same databases just 4 weeks earlier. Also paid search (adwords) increased a lot, especially bids on the brand name as well as a lot of people putting "name of the tv channel + vistaprint" in google. so the direct return was not that big but the uptake in all other channels (organic search, paid search, email marketing, display CTR) was massive which made it ROI+. Before we launched any offline ad, the company invested a huge amount of money in tracking tools and technology to make sure we could calculate the impact of the offline ads on the online sales. Vistaprint has an insane amount of engineers and business intelligence people for just that.
Thats why I am interested to learn more on how you measured the impact of each ad you did (newspaper vs magazine vs bus vs radio) and the impact on the amount of visitors and leads/sales you got out of that.
Originally Posted by cbrughmans
Tracking this is a bitch, you are very right.
I used simple methods since it was pretty much managed just by myself and I didn't have a team of coders and analysts to support me
1. special URLs just as you mentioned. In case of the radio competition for example, I directed people to certain page (landing page made for this) where I wanted them to look for a short text string. So I could directly see how many people opened it. In local newspapers that were distributed just in 1 city, I used an URL with the city name in subdomain.
2. I made sure that all other factors remained stable when launching some new campaign. So for example the real estate portal, we were buying a stable amount of clicks daily from adwords and similar networks. The levels were surprisingly stable, so when a spot aired in the radio I could spot even small increases in traffic that were not there before. I got a detailed schedule from the radio, prior to launching the campaign, so I knew exactly what hours it is gonna air. All I needed to do was to look at the stats by hour and I could see the small spikes there.
3. Since I was using tokens in the urls, to identify where the traffic comes from, I could easily spot an increase in traffic that carried no tokens. These were returning visits also, but mostly direct type-ins that resulted from offline campaigns.
The key to being able to analyze this with some accuracy was to properly time what to launch when and refrain from mixing campaigns without a plan.
Another good strategy that has worked for me (when I started out) and others is to create brand similar to the offer your promoting. Sort of like making your own offer with regards to a brand name loosely tied to what it is you're promoting but not having the responsibility and costs of getting product/warehousing/shipping etc. You can just rotate in different affiliate offers to your website if there's enough to test out. I did it with a proven campaign I was running on search in like 2009 so didn't bother to split test any offers.
1. Lock up the SERPs with reviews from sites you own and influence ahead of time (1-2 months depending on the competition).
2. Buy ads in newspapers, magazines aligned with target audience, radio spots etc
I was promoting Green Tea at the time. One of the WuYi brands I think. Bought a simple domain (wish I still had it) Teadiet.org developed it out with content etc, captured emails and sent them to presells.
Create a buzz about your offer or brand name and get people searching for it. Helps to mention the domain name obviously which I've set up in the past as a funnel. The good thing about magazines is that they sit at barber shops, waiting rooms for a long time. If an advertorial catches someones eye, it's repeat business.
this only works for companies that don't care about their brand name, a bluechip company like vistaprint would never allow this. nevertheless, good strategy on health/diet/skin/tea/nutra!
Originally Posted by groomez
Very very interesting!
And the observations and conclusions drawn from the numbers are GOLD.
Nice to learn about alternative ways to advertise other than what we're used to.
Thanks for taking the time to write this post!
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
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