75% of Seniors Believe that Newspaper Advertising is Important
Category: affiliate advertising
NEWSPAPERS PARTICIPATING IN MEDIABIDS’ PERFORMANCE-BASED PRINT ADVERTISING PROGRAM GENERATE RECORD REVENUE IN AUGUST 2020!
For over a decade, MediaBids has been driving print advertising revenue to newspaper publishers through its unique performance-based print advertising program. Every time a reader makes a qualified phone call, online inquiry, or purchase in response to a print ad placed on behalf one of MediaBids’ impressive roster of direct-response advertisers, the publication driving the response earns revenue. To date, August of 2020 has been the program’s most successful month ever, generating hundreds of thousands of ad dollars for newspapers large and small across the country. A daily newspaper in NY earned $40K during this record-breaking month from running a wide array MediaBids’ ads that were a perfect fit for their readership .
“MediaBids’ print ads have been a lucrative tool for our publication month-after-month. The revenue has been substantial and is increasing over time; 2020 has been a tough year in many respects, but MediaBids’ ads have been a bright spot. We can always count on receiving classified liner ads from top national brands, right when we need them. It’s easy to participate, and the team is great to work with.” – Janelle Anderson, Wisconsin Community Papers
“We have always believed in the power of newspapers and appreciate the crucial role they play in society – perhaps now more than ever before. We are proud to be an ally of the publishing industry and continue to strive to drive as much revenue as possible to print media brands to support their journalistic efforts.” – Jedd Gould, President, MediaBids Inc.
Newspapers can create a free profile on the MediaBids’ website (www.mediabids.com) to view a full list of available advertisers and payout information. Each ad has a unique phone number or URL that tracks response specifically to each publisher, and earnings are paid out monthly. There is no cost for newspapers or magazines to use MediaBids.
About MediaBids
MediaBids brings together newspapers and large consumer brands to leverage the power of print advertising to generate new customers for clients and additional revenue for publications.
For more information, contact MediaBids at 800-545-1135 or visit www.mediabids.com
Holiday Ad Spotlight: Fairytale Brownies
Fairytale Brownies are back this holiday season at Mediabids. Fairytale Brownies make a terrific gift that everyone is sure to love. Their brownies are made from the ”finest all-natural ingredients like rich Callebaut Belgian dark chocolate, creamery butter, fine cake flour and fresh eggs.” They also don’t use any trans fats, preservatives or artificial colors and they’re certified kosher. Fairytale Brownies are delicious and come in eleven different flavors from cream cheese to mint chocolate and raspberry swirl to toffee crunch. Fairytale Brownies also offers gourmet bars and cookies for nearly every occasion in their own uniquely designed gift boxes.
Their ”Christmas Brownie Bliss” gift box includes thirty-six individually wrapped, bite-size brownies in six different flavors. This special holiday gift is regularly $54.95 but is being offered for a limited time at $39.95 (25% off!) plus FREE shipping. A delicious holiday gift at a great price point for gifts to family, friends and associates. Visit Mediabids.com or call us at 1-800-545-1135 for more information or to request an ad today. The holidays are fast approaching!
Dramatically Higher Payouts Are Here
What a difference a year can make!
Over the past year something really notable and exciting has happened in response-based, national, print advertising. Per response payouts have gone up A LOT and more and better advertisers are moving into the industry.
In October 2018, among our set of advertisers, the average payout per response was $18.00. One year later the overall average has gone up to $27.00 – a 50% increase! But this isn’t even the most notable change year-over-year.
In October 2018, among our top ten highest payouts, the average payout per response was $46.00. One year later, the average payout per response, among our top ten highest paying advertisers is now pushing toward $100. The average is up 80% from one year ago and is now at $83 per response.
Our highest paying advertiser is now at $175 per qualified response. One year ago our highest paying advertiser was $100 per qualified response. That advertiser has since gone up to $115 per qualified response but this year-over-year increase is 75%. These trends are great for the industry and especially for publishers.
A big part of our role at Mediabids is to prove to advertisers what we’ve known for years – leads from print readers are the highest quality leads in direct-response advertising. Full stop. Print readers are more informed and thus are further down the conversion funnel, once they pick-up the phone to call an advertiser. These higher payouts from advertisers is proof that they’re finally getting the message and more importantly, seeing the results. As such we anticipate we’ll continue to see more advertisers be more aggressive with their per response payouts. In other words we don’t see these higher payouts as an inflation bubble that’ll burst. We expect to see payout continue to gradually move up across most verticals in national, per response, print advertising.
Current highest paying advertisers at Mediabids:
Shelf Genie
American Standard Walk Ins
LeafFilter
Andersen by Renewal
ADT Security
Acorn Stairlifts
MobileHelp
The Hartford-AARP
World Health Link
A Place for Mom
Visit www.Mediabids.com to view the ads for all of our campaigns, including the new Holiday 2019 campaigns we’ve just posted – Omaha Steaks, Hale Groves, Fairytale Brownies and others.
Performance Print #1 for Conversion
You Can’t Ignore Podcasts Forever
I tend to be a later adopter of things. I’m not a luddite by any means. But I still prefer CDs for music. I mean c’mon, the sound is far better than digital listening. I also still prefer newspapers and magazines in print rather than digital formats. I absolutely much prefer an actual book to an audio or reader version.
But I’m no luddite. Case in point, I listen to podcasts. Fact check: I listen to A LOT of podcasts.
I still haven’t listened to ”Serial,” the podcast that seemed to put podcasting on the map. But I do listen to other popular podcasts such as NYT’s ”The Daily,” ”In the Dark,” Slate’s ”The Political Gabfest” and the Ringer Network’s ”Bill Simmons Podcast” among many others that focus on politics and urbanism. If you’re already a podcast listener and you’re looking for something new, here’s a few lists of ”best podcasts of 2018:”
Advertisers and publishers are somewhat like me in that so far they’re still late adopters of podcasting. Pods have been around for at least fifteen years and season one of the first podcasting hit, ”Serial,” originally aired in 2014. Yet spending on podcasts is still under $400 million annually in the U.S. (in a $200 billion ad spend market.) So ad spending on podcasts is still relatively small but emerging.
On the publisher side of things, despite the success of ”The Daily” from the New York Times, podcasts from media properties, especially print media are still somewhat few and far between. Quick…name another one! Mother Jones, is one example, that does a great podcast for those inclined to listen about politics with a liberal lean. Also, shout out to my local daily paper that does a daily podcast on local news – The Morning Record.
Generally speaking podcasting is exploding but if one works in publishing or advertising there’s a surprisingly limited number of podcasts worth your time. Here’s an unofficial list (from this unofficial podcast reviewer) of the better podcasts that focus on topics in content and advertising:
There are many more podcasts that focus on more specific content and advertising topics – social media, site traffic, content marketing, affiliate marketing etc. etc. We’ll focus on a few of these in a future post.
In the meantime, consider giving these ad industry podcasts a try. Better late than never!
Contributor: Jim Jinks
Performance Metrics: PPC vs. PPCall
For ecommerce and direct-to-consumer advertisers and marketing managers, we know there’s no shortage of metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ponder and occupy our time.
Close or Conversion Rate
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Click Thru Rate (CTR)
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Abandonment Rate
Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
Ad Cost/Conversion (ACoS)
Lifetime Value (LTV)
Pay Per Click (PPC)
The majority of these metrics or KPIs are online or ecommerce focused, of course. As we all know, marketing dollars have increasingly gravitated toward digital media in large part due to its measurability. But at Mediabids we specialize in lead generation via print publications and platforms. In other words, we bring ecommerce-like metrics to offline commerce.
Several of the KPIs in our industry -performance-based print advertising- are just like those in digital marketing; namely LTV, CPA and conversion rate to name a few. But our ”click” is an actual customer call and our ”conversion” refers to a customer call being long enough to be a ”qualified call” – meaning the customer is normally speaking with the advertiser’s call center for one-minute or longer. We use unique phone numbers and URLs to track response to our client’s advertising. Whereas the heart of digital media is pay per click (PPC), the core of our industry is pay per call (PPCall.)
Many may be surprised (or not) to know that Amazon has emerged as one of the largest pay per click platforms in digital advertising. Amazon.com adds campaigns and new consumers every day. In fact, Amazon merchants currently enjoy a 10% average conversion rate -the highest in PPC advertising, so more and more advertisers are moving budget from Google and Facebook to Amazon PPC.
This got us thinking. How does Mediabids’ pay per call advertising compare with the industry leading pay per click platform? How does PPC compare to PPCall?
The following Amazon stats come from a recent PPC Den Podcast [”Amazon PPC Advertising Stats”] done by the guys at Adbadger.com. Click the link to check it out. The Mediabids PPCall stats are directly from our platform.
- Amazon’s global reach is well over 2 billion site visitors per month. At Mediabids our affiliate publications total in the hundreds of millions of print circulation per month. It goes without saying that on any given day our advertisers are reaching far fewer potential customers than sellers on Amazon. Nevertheless, the average campaign on Amazon generates 185 clicks a day while we generate an average of 48 gross calls per day. So on a per thousand basis, Mediabids’ performance-based print advertising is far more effective at generating response than even the best digital PPC platform.
- Conversions per day, per campaign are very similar – 18 on Amazon and 17 for Mediabids. Admittedly this isn’t a true apples-to-apples comparison but the similarity is notable.
- As you can see our average conversion to a qualified call (42%) is 4x higher than the average conversion rate of a campaign on Amazon (10%.) Alternatively, the average cost per call ($13.60) is significantly higher than the average cost per click ($1.01.) Important to note here that this relatively low average cost per click for Amazon does mask the much higher PPC rates in the more popular categories. But pay per call rates, given the higher operating costs, simply demands higher advertiser payouts per call. Also, again, the comparison of cost per click and cost per call isn’t a pure comparison. But the purchase intent and value of a customer actually picking-up the phone to call about a product or service is very high. It demands much more of the customer than a simple click on a digital button. A phone call also gives the advertiser an enormous opportunity to leave a lasting good impression on customers in a way that just isn’t possible through a site experience.
- The average daily spend per campaign is also not that far off – $186 on Amazon vs. $231 for PPCall. Given the disparity in the per click and per call costs one might expect the difference in the average daily spend per campaign to be greater.
- Lastly the advertising cost of sale (ACoS) is also more competitive than one might imagine. Our $13.60 ACoS would go up some with the inclusion of sales data from our advertisers but given the benefits to the advertiser of direct interaction with customers, the marginally higher ACoS is justifiable.
So there you have it – PPC vs. PPCall. PPClick will generate a higher volume of activity (though less efficient) but the conversion and cost metrics are more similar with PPCall than not.
Contributor: Jim Jinks
2016 Holiday Gift Guides – Publishers Monetize Audiences with Affiliate Links
Tis the season to scour the internet’s Holiday Gift Guides for the best presents for all the friends and family on your shopping list this year.
Publications have found a new way to monetize their audiences by producing content with shopping recommendations utilizing affiliate links.
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which the advertiser rewards an “affiliate” (aka publisher – online or otherwise) for each sale driven by that affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
So in other words, when you see a Gift Guide with clickable links published by the New York Times and you end up purchasing a product they recommend, that advertiser will give the publisher a percent of the sale to reward their efforts.
Instagram has made many of their “influencers” rich through affiliate networks such as RStyle, LIKEtoKNOW.it, ShareASale, Impact Radius, and others. This has long been popular among bloggers and independent website publishers as well. Though there are ongoing issues with disclosure and there may be more regulations in the future, this revenue stream is likely here to stay.
Now, many publications are getting into the game. The New York Times launched a beautiful interactive Gift Guide with dozens of product recommendations divided by category. This comes as no surprise following their acquisition of The Wirecutter, an online consumer guide which publishes in-depth product reviews.
The NYT includes the following disclosure (if you know where to look for it). But for many readers of the NYT unfamiliar with this type of advertising, it certainly further blurs the lines between editorial and advertising.
The gifts included in this guide were chosen solely by The New York Times. Our editorial content, including that by Wirecutter, which recently became a part of the company, is not influenced by advertisers or affiliate partnerships.
Through a third party, we may receive commissions on sales made on the linked sites. When our editors and writers make selections, they do not know what products may generate a commission, or what that commission might be, and payments play no part in their decisions.
Similarly, New York Magazine has a recommendation page called The Strategist. Real Simple has many holiday gift guides available as well, and I’m sure most magazines are building these types of pages now, if they haven’t already. Wired, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, the list goes on and on.
Buying print advertising, for years we’ve seen publications try to maintain “church and state” separation between their editorial recommendations and the revenue generated from their advertisers. But there are huge monetary opportunities from affiliate advertising revenue in providing product recommendations to loyal readers.
Sometimes we describe what we do here at Mediabids with per response advertising (or performance marketing) as affiliate advertising since many e-commerce companies are already familiar with affiliate programs and do these types of campaigns online. Supplementing their online affiliate campaigns with a print campaign is a great way for advertisers to reach a new and desirable audience. Likewise, it benefits publications by bringing revenue back to print through advertisers that wouldn’t otherwise consider the medium.
For publications looking to add an alternate revenue stream, or if you’re an advertiser interested in reaching new consumers…call Mediabids today at 860-379-9602.
The Print Observer - Newspaper & Magazine Advertising Insights 