Global Direct Investment Solutions

Corporate Development for a Networked World

OnTheShortList.com     SurgeUSA.org

ShortListNews.com

Online Ad Impressions : Promoting GDI-Solutions.com

Bruce Donnelly   bruce@gdi-solutions.com    (Biography)

3,300,000 ad impressions by December 2005.

Plan 5 to 6 million for 2006 at current pace.

How to advertise on this website or sponsor our "On The Short List" feature and event work

Daily visits show a consistent increase in 2005 of more than 50% over the same period in 2004.

We achieved 300,000+ website visits as expected in 2005 at an average of 27,000 per month

The distribution of directory visits by global region of interest during 2003, 2004 and 2005

The daily chart of online ad impressions above or our analysis of prior months below may interest some supporters of our work.  Online advertising is just one of the many ways we promote this GDI-Solutions.com website and OnTheShortList.com as we develop new contacts and project referrals.  These are not counts of ads displayed on our website for clients, but rather our own ads to promote this business through very relevant channels such as search engine direct response advertising to reach our target market.

Contact us about how our work can help you to reach relevant executives and professional advisors for your own marketing objectives.

The majority of the daily visits to our website are driven by Google search results because we offer relevant and useful content.  Online ads currently drive only about 10% of our site visits, but their impact is growing as we work on our campaign and target specific market sectors effectively.

We continually evaluate our market reach, and the cost-effectiveness of our marketing work and each part of our chosen marketing mix, as we choose how best to promote this business to achieve more well-qualified project referrals in a cost-efficient way.

When we receive a serious project enquiry, we always ask how they found us.  The answer in recent years has usually been a Google search.

We welcome feedback from anyone who has seen our ads, including comments about how to make the ads or this website more useful.

We have used large and small industry events, special events, hospitality functions, magazine display ads, direct mail campaigns, PR work, e-mail, faxes, professional networking, personal telephone contact work and other ways to reach more executives to introduce our services.

These are all available tools in the marketing toolkit, but they vary widely in cost of sales performance for this challenging niche market.

Since successful referrals to professional service providers are often compensated by a fee tied to the value of the sale, much like a commission, we are obviously motivated to drive down the high cost of finding and developing very well-qualified prospects and making successful referrals.

In other words, we need to develop successful referrals at a lower marketing cost than other ways of reaching executives who are responsible for relevant capital investment project plans.

The executives we serve are hard to reach, and ads may not impress them or be remembered.  Direct, personal contact is critical to our work, but costly.  After all, the time and expenses for a professional C-level salesperson add up quickly.

Executives contact us because they discover our free service and realize that our independent market knowledge and professional referral work can be valuable as a resource for their projects.

Statistics for online ad impressions can be somewhat misleading in terms of their actual market impact, as in the case of banner ads which rotate rapidly on high-traffic websites, or the circulation statistics and potential "market reach" of other media such as vertical trade magazines.  For example, some magazines make dubious assumptions that each copy is passed to several other readers.  How likely is that?

Just because 5000 or more CEO's or 40,000+ people receive a free magazine subscription, that doesn't mean they actually read it as carefully as the advertisers who like to admire how well and where their latest ads or those of competitors appeared - regardless of any measurable impact on sales lead generation and performance.  Non-profits waste a lot of money.

As this ad campaign shows, we can actually "reach" more than 30,000 potentially relevant contacts in a single day - repeatedly - at a far more efficient cost.

Like "bingo cards" for reader response services in a magazine, or their equivalent as website response forms, the click-through rate for an online ad is just a basic indicator that (A) somebody actually noticed the ad and (B) had some reason to respond.  That doesn't mean such interest is the same thing as a well-qualified prospect referral, or that the visit will directly lead to any transaction of high value.  Such a "lead" is not necessarily a well-qualified prospect, just as visitors to a website won't all be good prospects.  It's just an indicator of market reach and potential interest.

We focus on developing very well-qualified referrals which result in actual deals, rather than worrying too much about our website circulation statistics.  The statistics largely help to improve our targeting work.

The traffic patterns shown by the ad delivery totals per day are somewhat useful, because the delivery on weekdays for a B2B service such as this should be much higher than on weekends.  In fact, we have also reviewed the impression and click-through response patterns between US business hours and other times of day to confirm that our ads are mainly delivered during business hours.

For example, outdoor advertising doesn't necessarily get noticed or recalled by all of the people who drive by and could potentially see it.  Indeed, if the drivers are really busy and moving fast at the time, they may have no time to look.

The same people may drive past day after day, so the potential viewers in terms of traffic counts are not the same as the actual number of people who could potentially respond.  Our target audience may also include those who pay little attention to such ads, much like busy travelers at airports who may ignore all the advertising displays they pass.

If the same person passes repeatedly, the odds are much better that the ad will be noticed, but there is still no assurance that it is even relevant to their interests or that they will respond.  The level of response to search ads indicates interest.

Similarly, online users may ignore all the banners or other ads, even if those ads may try to demand attention by blinking or doing other annoying things (pop-ups, animation, etc.).  Why rotate blinking banner ads on pages which are all about unrelated topics?  Good ads are easily recognized at a glance as relevant by their target audience.

Unlike daily visit statistics, the ad impressions served are just an indicator of how often people could have seen our ads and responded if they paid attention.

The actual delivery rate of specific ads on any given day in response to user actions is not within our control, but the response rate by users to specific ad messages and keywords over time is something which we consider carefully.  This helps us to optimize the delivery of our ads and refine our message to our target audience, and to improve our website content so that we reach more valuable contacts, and fewer irrelevant visitors.

For example, we can quickly spot patterns in visit activity for a particular region or type of service, and then focus research on improvements to such content.  Similarly, we can test interest through response rates.

We aren't in business to drive up ad statistics and costs.  We want to reach our target market more effectively while driving our marketing costs down so that we can achieve very cost-efficient referral results.

For our purposes, we have found that very carefully targeted online advertising through a highly relevant channel, such as Google search results, is helpful because it reinforces search results and helps to guide visitors to the most relevant content rather than whatever page the search engine results turned up.

We have found that rotating banner ads and links from other websites or third party e-mail newsletters, even if very relevant to our work, generally produce few visits.

By contrast, search engines deliver timely project enquiries from executives in many countries at companies which we would not have reached otherwise.

We will continue to refine our marketing mix and the advertising we do according to such actual results.

Relevant reciprocal links are welcome, but they still drive few visits to our website at this time, while we get very good search engine results without them.

Impression statistics show how many times somebody could potentially have seen an ad, because it was actually served to a page  which their browser displayed, no matter how briefly.  Unless they respond (click through), nobody really knows if the ad was noticed or made a real impression.

Ads are sometimes served "below the line" (out of sight - requiring scrolling down or across to see it) and may therefore not be noticed, just as a magazine subscriber may never even look through a particular issue, or open it to the page where an ad appears, or notice the ad at all, or have any reason at all to respond to the ad.  Ads which are targeted to appear in response to a relevant search, however, are more likely to attract attention and arouse interest.

There are no guarantees that even the most clever ad designs and placements will deliver results.  At least click-through rates should be a more relevant sign of real interest than magazine circulation statistics, but direct response advertising is just one of many tools.

Our approach to online ads is that they should be useful by guiding individuals quickly and easily to the most relevant content according to what can be inferred about their interests by the context of their search or the page on which the ad appears.

In short, online ads should be helpful rather than annoying or useless to a top executive.

We apply this simple logic to the use of any ads on this website to reinforce presentations.

We only display ads on pages where they are clearly relevant and helpful to the expected users of the content of that page, rather than a useless distraction.

This can help users to recognize the links to ads they have seen, just as a point of sale display and packaging recalls an ad campaign in a retail environment.

This complements the GDI-Solutions content with field research work and custom search tools, as well as some new services designed to support marketing work by communities and professional service providers.

We welcome feedback from professionals in this niche market about their own online advertising experiences, particularly for any useful "lessons learned" which they may be willing to share, whether for attribution or anonymously, to help other professionals in this market to do better.

In short, we want to help the many advertisers in this niche market to reach their target audience more effectively and cost-efficiently.

Once again, we do not compete with other media such as advertising in magazines or their websites.  They serve this market in a very different way by publishing and distributing glossy magazines to a specific subscriber base, typically of free rather than paid subscribers.  They encourage reader responses so that they can distribute them to as many advertisers as possible to help sell more ads.

We encourage visitors to this website to contact us privately about their project interests so that we can personally help them and quickly refer them in confidence to what they want to find on the basis of more than 15 years of professional experience globally in this specialty, and an extensive network of contacts and market research capabilities.

The function and promotion of this website is quite different from that of a service provider who is promoting very specialized capabilities, or an economic development organization which is just promoting a specific business community.

Those are "service products" for delivery by their people and processes to potential new clients.  Professional services are generally divided into many specialized disciplines (tax, HR, legal, architects, engineers, etc.).

Our role is more analogous to a marketplace or a large store with many products on the shelf in different sections, and others readily available on special order basis since we know this market.

We are an independent distribution channel which can display and promote services in a well-organized way for the convenience of many buyers at a lower cost of sales for the suppliers.

We help executives to consider their choices, and provide a very fast and easy way forward by personally introducing the sources of information, services, and other contacts they want to find.

Our online advertising campaign is quite different from that of one professional service provider with a specific product to sell, or the promotion of a single business location.

The service providers and professionals may do their usual "brand campaigns" to raise buyer awareness and recall of their service "products", and some clients will obviously choose to "buy direct" in response to all of their marketing investments and brand reputation.  In general, however, such campaigns are very costly.

Our role is to promote this "store" in which their services can be quickly and easily found and bought by executives and advisors who may not be reached, notice, recall or respond directly to even the largest advertising campaigns.

Online advertising is only one component of our "marketing mix" to attract such executives and their advisors into the "store" at the time when they would welcome some help with a high value decision.  We also want them to come back whenever they may welcome help again, such as for a project somewhere else in the world.

Some of the larger professional service providers, such as the "Big Four" accounting firms, are also effectively distribution channels for a wide range of professional service products offered by their thousands of specialists in many locations.

They are, however, an exclusive distribution channel, like a specialty store which carries only one popular brand, despite many items in stock.

There are other cross-border or multi-service marketplaces.  Corporate real estate networks or law firm networks are typically an affiliation of private local partnerships which do business together as necessary in a consistent way because their clients need such capabilities.  Banks have had channels for working together across firms for centuries, rather than exclusively through their own internal capabilities.  Brokers are common in the financial services sector.

In this niche market, however, most of the service providers and business locations still go to market separately, at a very high cost for this exclusive market approach, rather than through a more efficient and global distribution channel.

The above graphic for June reflects our current ongoing target of roughly 250,000+ impressions per month through 8,000+ per business day and a much lower level on weekends.

The above graphic for July reflects our lower expectations for this month of roughly 125,000 impressions through 4,000+ per business day and a much lower level on weekends.

Given the July 4 holiday and summer vacations, we expected a lower reach during this month.  The campaign was being changed in late July.

This is a niche B2B market, so it is not our ambition to reach millions of individuals through ads.  Instead, this is a targeted campaign to reach a limited audience which is directly relevant to our work.  That includes professional business advisors who may have been unaware of this service as a potentially valuable resource for their clients.

The somewhat lower level of advertising reach as planned during the summer holiday season in July and August should pick up again in the fall.

Our new fall campaign will begin in August as this one is phased out as planned.  As a different campaign with different targeting objectives, the two campaigns will not be directly comparable.

Traditionally, the September - December period is a good time to reach executives as their results for the year become clear, and as they refine their capital investment plans for the year ahead.

Our plan had been to reach 1,000,000+ during this ad campaign to attract website visitors beyond the reach of our personally targeted marketing work, and analyze the patterns of their search interests.

Search engine results remain the largest driver of visits to our website, as expected by design from the beginning, although our personal marketing and networking still plays a major role in finding and referring capital investment projects.

We will not report on our fall advertising campaign reach, starting in August, until new patterns are established by our work on that campaign, since it will be targeted in a different way and thus will not directly comparable to our spring 2005 campaign as documented above.  We expect a somewhat lower, but more highly targeted, market reach.

Professional service providers and economic development organizations which want to take advantage of our growing market reach to highlight their own capabilities to the executives and advisors we reach should contact us directly to discuss how we may be of assistance.

We revised our advertising campaign during the month of August, particularly after some changes were made to the Google AdWords service which affected the expected delivery and cost of ads.

Our revised September - December campaign is already taking shape as planned.

•  Daily website visit statistics
•  Monthly website visit statistics
•  Analysis of regional interest by visitors

We have continued to revise our new campaign as we develop new contacts for investment projects during 2006.

Phil Eadon, in Durham England UK

specializes in B2B introduction services, events

+44 (0)191-415-7340    Office

from US dial as 011-44-191-415-7340

the country code is 44, Durham is 191

+44 (0) 78 34 730 929  EU mobile