Garber on Business: Being Seen on the internet

by Anne Garber

A definitive study was released recently that basically concluded that advertisers should be moving their budgets to the internet.

For the first time since data have been collected on the subject, said the study, Canadians between the age of 18 and 34 are spending more time on the Internet than any other media.

According to Ipsos-Reid, young Canadians spend on average 14.7 hours a week on the net, 11.7 hours a week listening to the radio, slightly less time -- 11.6 hours -- in front of the TV and 2.5 hours reading the newspaper.

The 18-to-34 crowd, which is considered to have the largest disposable income, is major target for advertisers.

"This change in media consumption has significant implications for advertisers and marketers," said Catherine Rogers, a senior research manager with Ipsos-Reid. "Any advertiser looking at this demographic should be reevaluating their marketing strategies, if they haven't already."

Of course, the real trick is to be FOUND on the net, not to just appear there. And that's exactly where you have to avoid the Big Fat Liars who unfortunately overpopulate internet advertising sales these days.

You can go to a reputable advertising, marketing or public relations firm, and believe me, that is money well spent. How to tell they are reputable? Well, you can check out their current client list and randomly call a few of the clients and ask how they like the results they get with the firm you are considering.

You can hire a freelancer, but again, don't just take their résumé at face value; call those clients and ask how the freelancer's work stacked up. Did they meet deadlines? Did they pad their bills? Charge for unexpected or unacceptable expenses? Did you give their client helpful, practical advice? Are they still working there?

We recently dealt with an unhappy client who came to us to repair unfinished and incomplete writing tasks performed by another freelance writer. We didn't know this writer -- and in fact had not previously even heard of her -- so we checked out her résumé ourselves (maybe we felt a little rivalry, who knows?). The upshot of it was that though her résumé was really quite impressive, it turns out she only performed one task or project for each client. She was not a "finisher," and was never hired a second time by anybody! The moral of this tale: Repeat business is a good indicator that you're dealing with a pro.

Search engines are everything in the Be-Seen-Online game. If you're not ranked in the search engines, you just aren't seen. End of story. So sad, too bad.

And people selling advertising on the internet -- in their zeal -- are sometimes just a teensy bit deceptive in their claims. The industry is so new -- and so unregulated, as we're beginning to learn -- that there's an enormous temptation to try every single scam out on such a potentially large audience at least once. We've heard claims from rival sites that are almost laughable, if they weren't taking advantage of small (and sometimes fledgling) businesses that need to spend their small budgets wisely.

That's why we tell those small businesses what we'll tell you: Internet advertising can be a great deal for those who understand how the game is played, and where the real potential buyers are hiding.

The cardinal rule is "Know your target market" -- or know your demographics.

The next thing is to find out what kind of page-views a website is really attracting. To do that, visit www.alexa.com and simply type in the name of the website you're checking out.

The "ranking" you will find is how far back from number "1" the website is. You will find that Yahoo is number one. MSN is number two. And Google is number three. I was personally surprised that the number one slot was not filled by Google, because that's what I use all the time, every day. And that points up another rule of thumb. Just because YOU do it, or like it, or have a habit, doesn't mean your target group does! I worked at a newspaper where a number of the top people in management were always using themselves as examples of what our readers wanted, and they couldn't have been further off the mark if they had lived in sensory deprivation tanks. The consequence of their short-sightedness (or navel-gazing, call it what you will) is that over the past five years -- only half a decade -- their numbers have fallen to approximately HALF of what they were previously! Isn't that amazing?

No one can afford to be "bleeding red ink", and of course in a small business, watching your pennies just goes with the territory.

So when someone soliciting advertising from you says their website gets "3 million page views a week," don't assume they are telling you the gospel truth. Go to Alexa and see where they rank. And just a hint: Number One? Yahoo, remember? They get in excess of 30 million PVs a day, and it definitely falls off from there, steeply.

Here at evalu8.org, we are but dust-motes in the system of online traffic, yet we are able to boast that we are in the "top 100,000" sites in the world. And we only get about half a million page views a month! So that website that says they're getting Three-mill a week? Check them out. I'd love to have money on a bet that says they're not!

Do you know a website called the Onion? It's a delightfully satirical online newspaper. Kind of like Jon Stewart if he only did news online, and only changed his content once a week. Which is still pretty special. Anyway, the Onion currently ranks at number 2699. That means there are 2698 websites AHEAD of them in the queue to number one.

By a very rough calculation, it looks to me as though the Onion gets about three million page views a week. So don't go believing that those local websites are getting that kind of traffic. I just went and checked one of those Big Fat Liar sites, and found their number is 309,522. That would mean their page views are about one-third of ours. And already TOLD you that we only get half-a-mill per month, so THEY must be getting, well, about a third of that. Three million, indeed. And no, I'm not going to tell you their name. Suffice it to say that when you use "Vancouver Restaurant Reviews" (as just one possible set of keywords) on Google, evalu8.org comes up in the first few results on the first page, and these other guys are buried at the bottom of the fourth page of results.

Our advertisers get seen, over and over again, and because our reviews are impartial, and provide a needed service to the reader, advertising on (and being written up on) evalu8.org yield real, measurable results.

Now, the next important thing you need to check is how many clicks each unique visitor (on average) makes when he or she visits a site. If it's around one click per person, that's WAY too low! It means the visitor immediate discovered that the site was not to his or her liking and *CLICK* -- away they went.

As well, you should check how many sites link back to the one you're checking out, how random visitors have "rated" the site for Alexa.com, and when you, yourself visit the site, check out the Look-and-Feel of the site, how it navigates, whether the design looks clean and fresh, and whether words and syntax look literate and professional.

With a few of these safeguards in place, you'll feel satisfied to spend your advertising funds, knowing that you're truly getting the best deal for your dollars.


Garber on Business: Being Seen on the internet - To learn more about this author, visit Anne Garber's Website.

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