Category: PPC

Holiday Ad Spotlight: Crown Maple Syrup

Crown Maple Holiday Ad

 

Crown Maple is artisan quality, estate-grown maple syrup from Madava Farms and 800-acre organic, family farm, established in 2010 in New York’s Hudson Valley. In addition to maple syrup, their product line-up includes maple sugar, maple-infused condiments, maple-flavored snacks and craft beverages with Crown Maple.

 

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This holiday season Crown Maple is offering three special gift options, each at 25% off! The three options include the ”Pancake Breakfast Gift Set,” the ”Bourbon Barrell Aged Organic Maple Syrup” and ”Infused Organic Maple Syrup Trio.” Customers can buy one or all three. Shipping and handling is only $5 per item. These are great gifts and a good value. Perfect for giving this holiday season to family, friends and associates.

We have display ads and a classified liner ad for this campaign. The ads are available in both color and BW. Visit Mediabids.com or call us at 1-800-545-1135 for more information and to request your Crown Maple ad today.

 

 

Mediabids Announces Over 1,000 Holiday Ad Placements

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PRESS RELEASE

MEDIABIDS ANNOUNCES OVER 1,000 HOLIDAY AD PLACEMENTS & COUNTING

Winsted, November 13, 2019 – This year marks the beginning of Mediabids’ second decade of being a leader in national print advertisers, on a performance-basis. Since 2008 Mediabids has generated nearly 5 million phone calls for hundreds of consumer-facing, direct-response advertisers. Mediabids has newspaper and regional magazine affiliate-partners nationwide and currently more than fifty different advertisers delivering print revenue. These advertisers believe in the quality leads and customer relationships that can only be activated through print media platforms and they want to be in more publications.

For the 2019 holiday season, Mediabids is offering six great gift advertisers. Omaha Steaks is back for the eleventh year. After Father’s Day, the holiday season is the second best time of year for Omaha Steaks sales. Hale Groves, Pittman & Davis and Crown Maple are back again this year as well. Finally, rounding out our roster of 2019 holiday season advertisers are Fairytale Brownies and Nueskes. Visit http://unbouncepages.com/holiday-ads-2019/ to see the ads and consumer offers.

Through November 12th, we’ve already exceeded 1,000 holiday ad placements. Our strongest season yet and still a month to go! Visit http://www.mediabids.com to view all our holiday ads and request yours today. We have the ads in all sizes and in color as well as black and white (including a classified liner ad for several holiday campaigns.) If you don’t already have an account at mediabids.com registering is quick and free of charge.

Contact:
Jim Jinks
VP, Business Development
jjinks@mediabids.com

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.

Payout Escalation

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

 

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For a printable pdf version click here: Mediabids_Affiliate_Handout_v1

 

So Let’s Talk About ”Conversions”

Conversion funnel

Are you a print publisher or print ad salesperson? How much do you talk to your clients about their conversion rates? Sometimes? Never? No worries. You’re not alone.

We know advertisers can be reluctant to share much about the results of their advertising. We know it’s much easier to thank them for their business and not ask too many questions. But times have changed and you may be surprised. Many of your clients might appreciate discussing ad effectiveness and sales conversion as it relates to their print advertising. You can bet they know a lot more about how their digital advertising is or isn’t working for them. Ultimately what do you really have to lose? The potential upside is priceless because engaging your advertisers on performance metrics can go a long-way toward cultivating a long-term and mutually-beneficial business relationship.

But before shooting off an email or picking up the phone to call your clients, here’s a little background and ammunition:

Conversion rates are usually ”contextual” and industry specific. In other words, ”conversion” doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to everyone. To complicate things a bit more the range of consumer actions an advertiser can measure is broad – sales, website visits, social media engagement, calls for more information, email opens, web form completions, content downloads, mobile ad clicks and more.

Print conversion rates are generally very good when compared with the rates of other media. Actually we’re understating it a bit. Print conversions are virtually without compare. They blow everything out of the water. This is especially true of the one media where much of the ad dollars are flowing these days – digital!

The average click-thru-rate (CTR) for a search campaign is 1.5-2.5%. The average website conversion is in the 2.5-4.5% range.

The average conversion rate of our print campaigns range from a high of 77% down to less than 10%. But the average is 42%! Meaning, on average, nearly one of every two calls is a qualified call. (Note: A qualified call is one that goes longer than the specified minimum length to determine the caller is indeed a potential customer.)

Conversion by Pub Type

This chart (above) shows the call conversion rates of our performance-based print campaigns across campaign category and publication type. The ”Mass Consumer” campaign bucket includes consumer products and services like satellite TV, internet, travel, car donation campaigns, dating services, home improvement and others. The ”Seniors” category includes all our campaigns that primarily serve or seek 65+ consumers including drugs, mobility devices, walk-in tubs, insurance and others. As you can see, daily publications do particularly well with both the mass consumer and seniors customers. Weekly and monthly publications have better conversions with the seniors campaigns than the mass consumer campaigns.

Conversion to a qualified call is analogous to when someone clicks on a search or display ad online. When the caller makes a purchase, it’s akin to when a website visitor places an online order. These are both examples of sales conversion. Our advertisers have an average sales conversion rate that is well above 15-20% range. We know this from client reporting and from the fact that call center costs are much higher than ecommerce campaigns. Performance-based print campaigns demand that call centers are converting to sales that at minimum levels still far exceed digital conversion rates.

The chart below shows the conversion rate difference between search ads and our performance-print campaigns and website sales conversion relative to the average print ad sales conversion of our advertisers. As you can see print conversion is 10X or more the average digital conversion rates.

Digital vs Print Conversion

So with print conversions thoroughly outperforming digital it begs the question why so many ad dollars are flowing to digital? Perhaps it’s in part due to our tendency in print ad sales to avoid discussing conversion and performance metrics. Print advertising isn’t just for brand awareness or recall. Good products and services and strong consumer offers in print do in fact move readers quickly down the funnel towards the sale. There’s a great story to tell. Those of us in print just have to tell it much more often.

For nearly two decades Mediabids has been offering print publishers ways to reach new advertisers, sell ad space and generate new ad revenue via performance-based print advertising. We have dozens of national, direct response brands that believe in print and the value of performance media. Mediabids’ specializes in bridging the gap between measurable response and print-based media. To view and request our performance-based print ads (display and classifieds) and digital display ads, visit Mediabids.com, sign-in and click on “View All Per-Inquiry Advertisers” in the middle of the page. For more information email Jim Jinks at jjinks@mediabids.com.

 

Performance Metrics: PPC vs. PPCall

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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.)
amazon ppc

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 ppc vs mediabids ppcall

  • 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

Print Ad Success, Happens To Be Just Like Fishing (no kidding!)

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I just returned from my annual trip to Alaska, where I did a lot of fishing with my kids. Stay with me for a minute, there is a point to this that relates to marketing in newspapers. I believe, that what I have learned about fishing applies to marketing in newspapers.

Not surprisingly, my kids all like catching fish more than they like waiting for fish to bite. The problem is that a big part of fishing is waiting (I always tell them, “that’s why they call it fishing, not catching”) and having faith that the fish will respond sometime soon. If my kids believe that we have gone to a bad spot or that there is no hope in trying, their attention to detail diminishes. Instead of checking the bait every few minutes, they check every hour. They don’t hold the rods, they put them in the boat’s rod holders. They are less likely to try different techniques or pay attention to where their bait is positioned. In short, fishing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You are unlikely to be successful, unless you pay attention, which is easier to do when you believe that success is possible.

In an effort to counterbalance the inevitable impatience of children fishing, for the past several years I have manufactured a new “secret spot” that some unnamed but very wise old friend has told me about. I tell my kids that this friend caught monsters at this spot and their enthusiasm rises to a fever pitch. They believe that this spot will produce fishing glory, so they fish harder, are more attentive to detail and are more patient than they would be otherwise. So it is no big surprise that my fictitious “secret spot” always outperforms other areas that we fish.

Fishing is a hard thing to scientifically quantify and there is no doubt that a certain amount of luck factors into a good day of fishing. However, I firmly believe that there are many factors that a fisherperson can control and the expectation of success creates an environment where success is more likely.

Now, stay on the line, I am about to set the hook – marketing in newspapers is very similar to fishing.

As you probably know, we do a lot of response-based print marketing here at Mediabids. In response-based marketing there are two parties who are involved in a transaction. First, there is the advertiser who is trying to generate response for their goods or services. Second, there is the publication, who wants revenue from the results they generate for that advertiser.

Too often, I believe, all parties (and I include Mediabids in this group) don’t expect success for a specific ad in a specific publication. They want success, but they don’t expect it. All parties involved act like my kids when they are fishing in a spot they believe is unlikely to yield results. But attention to detail generates better results in fishing and in newspaper marketing. Maybe the ad would perform better with a different offer or at a different price point? Maybe the ad would generate more response if it ran in a different section of the publication or at a different size or on a different day of the week? Often it is the little things that determine the difference between an ad performing well or below expectations. However, if success is not expected, it is easy to ignore those little things, which only increases the odds of failure. It is too easy to say, “This ad isn’t going to work.” and not try anything. It is like my kids saying, “There are no fish here.”

We should all expect success from print advertising. We have all seen enough success stories to know that print can generate large numbers of highly qualified results. It should happen with every ad we place, but it doesn’t. It is the job of Mediabids, the advertiser and the publication to expect and demand that ads perform well.

Post by Jedd Gould.

Affiliate Summit East

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We’ve covered Affiliate Advertising here on the Print Observer blog in the past…

Here: “Customer Acquisition: Using Online and Offline Affiliate Marketing to Generate New Customers”

And here: “Affiliate Marketing – Changing Marketers Expectations of Advertising Results”

At Mediabids, we’re uniquely positioned to help advertisers complement their online affiliate programs with our affiliate print program which allows advertisers to pay per response for reaching new customers and prospects in newspapers and magazines.

Our program which includes our exclusive network of thousands of print publications provides a performance-based model through which advertisers can drive calls and sales.

To learn more go to: https://www.mediabids.com/

We’ll be at Affiliate Summit East this coming Monday in NYC.  For any advertisers or partners looking to connect, please email Darcy Mauke at dmauke@mediabids.com.