Thursday, June 9, 2011

Offline ads get more clicks per impression than most online methods

I have used offline methods such as flyers to promote online products for several years now. I've never done much analysis of where my clicks and sales were coming from, but it always seemed to me that the offline clicks were better quality. The reason I came to that conclusion was that I'd usually get more sales in the weeks and months after doing some concerted offline promotion.

I'm pretty sure that assessment was correct because I've just been promoting an affiliate program using both methods. The network has really comprehensive stats and they reveal a pronounced difference between the results generated by each of them.

I have one banner on a web page that I've been promoting solely offline, and over the last month that ad has received 58 impressions and 8 clicks. I have another banner for the same program that is on one of my blogs. Granted, it's an eclectic blog, not specifically related to the affiliate product on offer. But it's had 988 impressions over the last month with only 4 clicks.

As yet, I haven't had any sales of that product. Still, there's a pretty noticeable difference there. And I think this is mainly due to the fact that if someone goes to a website as a result of seeing an offline ad you can be sure they're reasonably interested in what it offers. They'll also type it in, meaning they'll give it their full attention for a short while at least.

The same cannot be said of various forms of online promotion. Sure, search engines are very targeted. But even then people are often whizzing through them quickly, flitting from query to query. And blog and site hopping is not so targeted, and often happens when the searcher is a bit bored. It's more a kind of grazing behaviour than anything focused.

That's why I think offline promotion of sites is worth doing. It's pricier, slower and more laborious. But it can still be profitable.

4 comments:

  1. Good point Matt. If someone goes through that much trouble to reach your site, they have a vested interest in making sure they haven't wasted their time. So I view offline as great tactical support for online efforts.

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  2. This works really. Many people hates those banners ads on site but they will be willing to read newspaper's ads better than online ads because Online ads is very much common nowadays. Thanks a lot for this :)

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  3. Barret: Yes, they do seem to concentrate more when arriving this way. And it the most geo-targeted traffic you can get.

    Olawale: Yes there's way too much advertising online. Of course many of us online are promoting things, but you can go overboard with it!

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  4. I don't know, Matt... there may be an overload of online advertising but I think it is way more efficient that offline advertising, especially if you have proper knowledge and means.
    Look at this system from http://craigsflyer.com for example: it gives you a flyer that you can use on all social media networks, plus gets the bonus of being indexed by search engines via their website. All of this free... ad to this other means of advertising, craigslist and similar sites and so on...
    This makes me believe that although there may be cases where offline you have more success in promoting your products/services, but the majority of them are doing much better getting known online...

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