Don’t Tell Me How Many People Saw my Ad

I am going to vent a little bit about advertising platforms or mediums that refuse to give the advertiser the ability to track conversions or where their users just don’t convert. At the end of the day, I can care less if 3 million people saw my ad. In fact, I don’t care if 3 milllion people clicked on my ad, if there are 0 conversions, the advertising is pointless.

Much of the advertising out there just does not work. How many times do you see the same advertiser run T.V commercials or print ads? If you don’t have “branding” dollars, these mediums simply don’t work. In fact, Jeff Bezos the CEO and Founder of Amazon stopped TV advertising completely to give savings and free shipping to Amazon customers:

“About three years ago we stopped doing television advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising in two markets - Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis - to see how much it drove our sales. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers. So we put all that money into lower product prices and free shipping. That has significantly accelerated the growth of our business. “

Here are some advertising mediums we tried and will not do again unless they can prove ROI.

SpotRunner - TV advertising for the small guy. If you want to throw away 4 grand. Here is one place to do it. You can track phone calls but they get excited when they tell you x thousand people saw your ad. Who cares.

Print - There are platforms that allow advertisers to be in one or many newspapers for a fee, a big fee. In my experience, newspaper advertising just does not work.

FaceBook - We advertise on FaceBook but they refuse to allow for Google Tracking. This means we can’t see how many people, if any, are converting.

Radio - There are platforms that give advertisers the ability to advertiser across the US on hundreds of radio stations. Our experience showed negative ROI.

Bottom line, if you are a publisher and you want my money. Prove to me you can generate more sales than the advertising dollars it costs me. If you won’t give me the ability to track, you are telling me you don’t work.

Rent Marketer is a business to business sell but many business to consumer products have tried the advertising above with no success. Here is a quote from rentals.com where they advertised on TV and Radio to generated more renters to their website.

“In the third quarter, we conducted a one-time limited Rentals.com targeted marketing and advertising campaign. We believe that the best way to continue to drive revenue growth is to deliver results for our advertisers and one of the ways to deliver results is to provide traffic to the listings. The campaign was aimed at driving traffic to the website to increase links for property owners and building brand awareness among potential advertisers. The campaign was effective in generating leads and increasing sales volume but not at an acceptable cost, and we’re working on other ways to achieve the desired results.”

Publishers, don’t sell me eyeballs. Sell me results.