What other methods of advretising does everyone use?

One thing we recently discovered. We have been running adwords with content ads. We discovered two websites that continuously and overwhelmingly showed clickthroughs. They are directed into a target audience, covering a theme that overlaps with our service.

We have long suspected this should be a relevant and appropriate market to hit. Now we are focusing on how to hit this market more specifically, with a stronger presence, and more regularly. It could be through direct marketing on these web sites, it may be through other ways.

At least via adwords this has been an inexpensive way to convince us to spend more marketing effort in this particular area.

I've shared this in some forums here and elsewhere and through some PM's. One webmaster described how he found similar consistency through content ads but in areas that don't easily lend themselves to expanded directed marketing. I guess this would work for some topics/businesses and not for others. In any case in our case it has been a beautiful way to uncover other sources for marketing.

 

I still don't know how you found out which site was showing the ads. My referrer log just says googlesyndication...blahblah it does mention the Pub ID but how do I extract the site out of that?

 

How do you find out which site the leads are coming from? I only show clicks come from the syndication URL.

 

Go directly into the logs. At least in our logs, the googlesyndication lines are very long; longer than anything else. To the right of the google syndication info; we are seeing the originating urls;
"www.domain". We have checked everyone of those sites and our ads do appear, in our case they are themed.

Our log analysis tool shows first page (or search source) for different pages hit on the web. We only look at conversion pages (though I just realized we are directing the adsense click throughs into an interior page). That is, at least for us, a second source of info. The analysis summary again shows the long googlesyndication info and further down we see the originating source.

Good luck.

Dave

 

You inspired me to go to pages I never look at in my yahoo store manager to see if I Get to look at the entire ad syndication url. Lo and behold; there the URLs are - and I've been struggling to find good related sites that have advertising spots. Gives me a great place to start. Very nice. Thanks for the tip!

 

What does it cost to sponsor a local sports team? Sounds like it'd be a good fit with my sports-related business.

 

Joint ventures.
Find a company that provides something that is complementary to what you provide. For eg. if you provide a gym service, go look for a sports shop and tell them. "How about if I give you gym vouchers that offer 3 month membership (worth $300) at no cost? I just need you to run a promotion like (Buy $100 worth of products and get a $300 worth gym voucher free.)" Will the shop turn you down? Most of them won't. How much do the vouchers cost you? Pretty much nothing.

The shop gets vouchers to attract customers while you get a new stream of customers and free publicity. It's a win-win situation for both parties.

 

I'd like to advise you another way. Your own toolbar may become a powerful marketing tool. You may:
- create a shortcuts to your site's functions;
- inform your visitors about news, updates, etc.;
- implement a search trough your site;
Also, you can't distribute your site, but you can distribute a toolbar that will show main features of services that your site offer. So, I think thatwould be useful to build a custom toolbar.

 

I agree that getting a custom toolbar installed on a large number of computers would be a good way to market; however, I don't really see how most websites would be able to achieve such a thing.

With so many "major" toolbars available, what would we be able to offer to make a visitor chose to install "mydotcom toolbar" instead of say the google toolbar?

To me it all sounds good in theory, but I doubt this is a realistic way to market for the average webmaster?!

Geir

 

yeah..there are just too many toolbars around. Unless your site is a place where the user visits very regularly, otherwise he wouldn't even bother to install the toolbar. Not very sure how you can use the toolbar to market your site to users who have NOT been to your site.

 

Thank you for reply, guys, of course you're mostly right. But your own toolbar would be customized only for your site. Google or a Yahoo wouldn't do it, right? So, it is advantage for the constant clients And if you present for example some shortcuts for your services or special fetures... For example, would Google toolbar allow you to search directly on your site, or to order a product from your e-shop, or will it become some sort of control panel for users of your hosting company? I don't think so
And about involving new visitors. Of course, if he don't ever visit your site he wouldn't install your toolbar. But if you register your toolbar in a software catalogues it may bring a new visitors through it

And again thank you, best regards

 

Ok, so what if you were to provide the Google toolbar + any others that your users would want and just add some cool functionality specific to your site to the back of that?

This how you can do it:

Using the Toolbar Browser plugin, create your own toolbar. Include installation instructions in the XML to also include the google bar (that you can download as a separate XML) from the site. When users install the toolbar, they get the google bar that they are used to, plus all the cool custom functionality that you put in yourself.

Oh and Its all freeware, so you can do with it as you like.
The url is: http://www.toolbarbrowser.com

Ren

 

i think that the good old word of mouth deserves all our respect. Still amazing what can happen with it.