Gourmet Station Blog - Ad Blog Campaign (3)
12/01/2004
GourmetStation is about to test advertising on blogs with a 2-week holiday campaign. We've been working with Blogads to develop a targeted media plan. With Henry's help we've identified 12 properties that fit our budget and the demographic profile of our holiday gift patrons.
Creative is in developement and we anticipate running during the weeks of Dec 6 and Dec 12. Since Blogads doesn't track conversions each ad will include an offer that will then allow us to measure effectiveness.
In the process we've learned that a blog ad buy is a little different than other online media purchases. We found that:
- Most blogs have limited information regarding visitor demographics. A Socialite's Life was one of the few. Nice touch!
- Most blogs that want to get into the ad blog game haven't thought through what a buyer might need to make a decision.
GourmetStation has worked very hard to develop a specific brand image and we wanted to ensure that the blogs we chose could support that, as well as, of course bring us quality prospects. For those that are considering an ad blog strategy here's our first attempt at -
Ad Blog Purchase Guidelines
1. Review blog for content appropriateness. The About Me page will often provide a sense of what the blog is about ... or not. Some blogs don't even have one. If you want my ad bucks I want to know who and what you're blog is about.
2. Review the number of comments and trackbacks. If a blog had a high comment ratio our thoughts were that visitors were more engaged and perhaps would click on the site sponsored ads...and convert to a purchase!
3. Reviewed current ads. Our thoughts were that like people play together. We dropped a blog from out list when we saw that our ad would run next to a buy gun ad. Just not our target audience.
3. Reviewed the relative traffic (impressions) that Blogads provided.
4. Ran blogs though Technorati to get a sense of number of in-bound links and properties that were linking to the blog. A couple of blogs provided direct links to their Technorati page - very helpful. More clicks for our bucks.
5. Reviewed Site Meters where available.
We anticipate this will be a learning process for us and we're happy to share our experiences along the way. A big thank you to Donna, prez of GourmetStation for her generosity in allowing me to blog this adventure.
