If anyone's interested I posted some Google Newspaper program screen shots at the blog today. Pretty cool stuff
I was involved in Google's pilot for magazine ads. My 1/4 page ad appeared in Motor Trend July 2006 issue. I thought it was really cool and couldn't beat the price ($0). I think I was just blessed for that one. It looks like Google stepped up their approach for newspaper ads versus the magazine ads. I'll be interested to see what kind of results you get and how they compared to mine. Keep us updated. I would like to hear prices if you're willing to share them for your industry.
Wow this is amazing!!! You were really blessed Hulligan... I wish I will get some hand on experience on these pilot projects of Google Please do share your experience, as if I can't get that at least I can understand and enjoy the way you people have experienced it. Keep Writing!
I was doing some pay per click advertising for an automotive website of mine. I heard about the pilot and saw they were trying the magazine ad experiment with only a few industries. One of them was automotive. Within automotive, they had Motor Trend, Car & Driver and some other prominent magazines. I placed a bid for all three months for Motor Trend and Car & Driver for the smallest ad which was about 1/4 or 1/3 of a page. I had a modest PPC monthly budget, so I only bid about $20 for each one. Weeks later, I received an email saying I won an ad in the July 2006 issue of Motor Trend. Motor Trend has the biggest reach of all of the automotive magazines so I was pretty excited. In addition, they said it would be free. The reason was no one else bid on the same month, magazine and ad size I did. Aside from placing my bid, the entire process was done over email while working with someone at Google. I created an ad and it hit the news stands on 6/6/2007. I saw a big jump in new visitors. For the price I paid ($0), it was great. However, with no measured ROI or stats it was not as good as PPC. Besides, I found out my experience was the exception. Most other advertisers paid a lot of money for their ads. Google followed up with me a couple months later to see what I thought about it. Based on what happened with the magazine ads, I can only guess they have received better feedback for newspaper ads since they have built an interface for advertisers to use. Looks like it is in a later phase. I you want to check out my ad in the Motor Trend July 2006 issue, check out the bottom of page 97.
I tested a newspaper ad a few months back and created a unique url to track the results. Not a perfect science but better than flying completely blind. Results here.
Very informative. I was unable to include a unique URL with my ad so I missed out on the visitor by ad count. But I could tell through my stats and conversion action there was an increase. My results were very similar to yours. My assessment was the same as well. Unless Google can offer the magazine ads at a very low cost, it would not work for me. Unfortunately, low ad cost for premier automotive magazines is not possible so newspaper ads probably have a much better shot.
Screenshots of Google Print Ads (which is part of adwords) emerged today on the marketing pilgrim blog. Looks pretty good! I also discussed and posted screenshots of google print ads on my internet marketing blog as well.
Ya I heard that before.. Print ads. I am interested to know how it performs. Please do let me know how it turns out to be.
The only test I did was late in 2006 and I was never given access to the interface that is being shown in the recent screen shots. I'm going to test the "new" AdWords print system in the next few weeks and will update everyone once I get something in place.