I established a leadership consulting firm in 2002 to provide executive coaching services and leadership development courses to leaders in organizations of all sizes and types. I launched a new website in December 2009 and experimented with some advertising to drive traffic to the site. Here’s what I have learned.

Analytics
Watching where people go on your website is critical to adjust your content to match their interest. My first website was more of an electronic brochure. It was fine for people I had met in person but was not sufficient to make a first impression on its own. When I launched the new website last December the design was much better thanks to a friend of mine who is a graphic designer. The web designer who implemented the site added analytics so I could see the traffic patterns. It was amazing to see where people went on the site and it caused me to add some content. One of the most popular areas turned out to be information about my past clients so I added a client list and some client success stores to go with the testimonials I had there. These are some of the most trafficked areas on the site now.

Advertising
I initially experimented with LinkedIn Ads which worked very well. I had noticed that I was getting a lot more traffic to my LinkedIn profile than my website so I decided to try a line ad with LinkedIn to drive people to my website. It started driving traffic to my website the first day I ran the ad. The system was very easy to use and LinkedIn has a lot of profile information for their members so I could really pick and choose who you I wanted to view the ad.

I also tried Google Adwords and Facebook Ads and ultimately found Facebook ads to be the most cost effective of the three. It’s not as targeted as LinkedIn but makes up for that by being a lot less expensive. Google Adwords is a little complicated. There are two different systems. There’s the Keyword system that puts ads in Google searches that match the keywords you list for the ads. I didn’t get many clicks that way. Then there’s their Network system that places ads on appropriate websites. That’s where I got most of my clicks which were very cheap. Unfortunately not many showed up in my analytics so I suspect that some of the sites were charging for clicks that weren’t happening.

I initially paid for impressions but found paying for clicks to be a much easier way to impact the volume of visitors to my website. Most of these internet advertising programs use a bidding system to determine what ads run. I paid for impressions at first but found very quickly that I worried a lot less about the cost if I just paid per click. Watching your impressions, click through rates and cost per click can become a bit of an obsession. Paying per click eliminated all that and allowed me to impact the volume of visitors much more easily. Since I was initially in a hurry to get views to one of my programs I put in a high bid to get more clicks. The bid was more competitive with other bids so it ran more and got more clicks. The program I’m currently advertising is less time dependent so I’m bidding lower because I’m more interested in cost effectiveness. I’m getting a lower volume of clicks but at a lower average cost per click.

Website Lessons
I found that my content was not very effective at getting people to stay on my site. The ads I run land on specific pages of my website that describe the programs I’m advertising. I noticed that a lot of the visitors were bouncing, looking at just that page and then leaving the website without looking at other pages. When I looked at the pages where I was sending them I realized that there were no pictures and no links to other areas of my website, other than the standard menu. It was nothing but a text description of the program. A rookie mistake I suspect. I added pictures of the instructors for our class with links to their bios. I started to get more people to stay on the website and view other pages. I also noticed that the visitors coming from Facebook didn’t bounce as much as the ones from LinkedIn or Google. When I tracked the cost for each system I calculated the cost per no bounce visitors as my final determination of effectiveness. This is where Facebook came out way ahead. Here are the links to the landing pages for my ads.

http://www.caravela.us/pages/programs/course_effectlead.html
http://www.caravela.us/pages/programs/exec_coaching.html

The final lesson I learned is that I need a way to collect visitor data. Although I’ve had about 250 people visit my website through the ads I’ve run – I don’t know who any of them are. Our sales cycle is very long so I need a way to capture people’s contact information and stay in touch with them over time.

Good luck. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or if you have any suggestions on how to do all this better. I think we’re all still trying to figure all this out.

First, on the advertising side is Space150′s Mobile Marketing Workshop, it’s all afternoon on Monday Aug 11th with presentations from lots-o-places including; Nokia, Weather.com, and Yahoo!.

Then, on Tues we’re having the regular MNteractive User Experience Meetup at the Monte Carlo, 5pm. Topic: the mobile user experience.

No agenda, just a wide open topic. I’m hoping we’ll have respresentation from DoApps, FanChatter, Refactr, and everyone that’s working on low-bandwidth optimized or iPhone versions of their apps.

Update:
Big thanks to every that attended for making this our biggest event in memory, and to Kathryn Pfriem from The Creative Group for picking up the tab. It’s been a week and I’m still stunned with the conversation and mix of attendees.

[source: randomgoodstuff]

I can imagine getting lost in the rain while walking is a scenario we’ve all been in numerous times and this is the gadget we’ve been waiting for.

My only question- how usable is this? I like the idea of watching people walk down the street  staring up into their umbrella watching CNN or the lastest episode of Family Guy and running into people.

Looks to me like a great (yet annoying to consumers) way to advertise.

Would you buy it?

“If your web advertising strategy is built around page views, you’re going to have to find another way to sell.” – Terry Heaton

There’s lots of goofy web design artifacts that exist because ads are sold by page views: article pagination, skinny skinny column widths, partial text feeds, MySpace.

Hopefully, all a remedy for this insanity will be with us soon, for according to Heaton, Nielsen NetRatings will drop page views for time spent. Wow! Innovation! Creativity! Sarcasm!

Metrics that can be executed by a robot only encourages more robots. Measuring time spent just means the page view robots will be traveling much slower.

So what’s a publisher what wants ads and a advertiser that wants smaller newsholes to measure?

How about actions instead of the ever silly impressions?

How about engagement and passion instead of reach?

Later:
Searching for a ‘print’ button makes this an arms race.

Robert Scoble raises the same issue:

“I keep bugging Dan Farber about [offering full text feeds] and he says he can’t do anything about it because of the advertising model that ZDNet has chosen.”

Occassionally something is posted there that I feel like sharing with the interactive community. And I think this is a pretty good one.

What a way for Yahoo! to advertise. Seriously.

Enjoy!

Search Engine Smackdown 

While the rest of the press was covering Google’s Pay-Per-Action event and new Google Homepage themes, I received confirmation that Google is extending their popular AdWords and AdSense programs to the homeless sign holders on highway exits and stop lights.

By combining Google Maps & Traffics services, advertisers purchasing through Google’s programs will be able to select the exact geographic location their ads are presented. And in some select locations – who the ads are presented by.

John L, product manager for AdSense promoted the program, “This is the first effort of it’s kind and goes to the heart of our goal to not be evil.”

Until the inventory increases, many of the ads will be community service announcements and other messages from non-profit organizations.

UPDATE:
In reaction to today’s news, Mike Arrington wrote:

“This should be good for Google’s overall market share and long term revenue growth. Anything that drives fraud out of the network will get advertisers to actually spend more money, not less, as their ROIs increase.”

UPDATE 24 Sept 2009
More great signs.

They (someone named “Zoe”) wanted to talk about my website (which one?) and how I could make money with it. By putting Yahoo’s ads on it.

“I’m not interested.”

“Not even if it could make you money?”, Zoe questioned.

“If you’ve been to any of my websites, you’d know that I think advertising makes sense.”

Anyone else get these calls?

I mean from Yahoo….not me being snotty about ads.

His call to action:

“Please send me any other links that you find related to the decline of mass media and the death/inevitable decline of the agency model. BTW I’m not saying that the agency is dead, just the model of earning revenue based on the cost of communicating. As the cost of communication reaches zero earning 15% of that is a pretty bad business model.”

Other reaction from the blog/ad world:

Steve Rubel: “[Agency.com] set their entire credibility in the social media space back eons and maybe did the same for other interactive agencies.”

Bjoern Ognibeni: “Unfortunately what they have produced looks like one of the worst episodes of the “The Apprentice” mixed with the classic “Truth in Advertising” clip – sadly without any trace of irony.”

AdRants: “Everyone in the industry needs to watch this. Not because it’s good but because it makes ad agency people look dumb and sound really stupid.”

Paul Adams: “Finally, it does show that Agency.com couldn’t deliver a clear message and meet the 5 minute brief. They used almost double the time – with no clear message.”

My favorite is Coudal Partner’s video response.

On the other hand, bloggers are now talking about Agency.com and Subway together. Both parties have public, measurable data on seeding del.icio.us, YouTube, and Technorati with marketing messages in an inexpensive way (whatever 3 days of Agency.com’s team cost…I’m guessing north of $30,000).

Here’s the “official” weblog: When We Roll, We Roll Big

UPDATE 25 Aug 2006: Agency.com pulls out of the running

The cool stuff is hard to find and therefore easy to ignore. The fact you’re reading this means you’re missing something far more interesting with someone far cooler. My apologies.

When I launched MNteractive a couple years back – it was just a calendar. Of everything somehow related to design – exhibits at the Walker and Art Institute, professional organization meetings, anything. Most venues didn’t publish RSS or even iCal, – I’d manually re-publsh the events to this site to generate both. Still do – for far fewer events these days. Anyone with a MNteractive login can publish, so get to it.

If you’ve read any of my rants on the problems of advertising over at my other blog I’m being redundant here: publishing and distributing in print, television, and radio is expensive, cumbersome, and painful. Advertisers soothe that greater pain in exchange for adding a little bit more.

This additional pain is felt in two ways:

1. By the publisher – in an increased publication size (i.e. TV programs are shorter without ads)
2. By the reader, viewer, listener – by interrupting, distracting from, and in all other ways devaluing the publisher’s original message.

With great exception, these pains don’t exist in the online realm. The majority of websites can live quite happily on a few dollars/mn shared hosting plan. The price of a dinner with wine at the Highland Grill.

I used to look forward to the City Pages’ Best Of issue. It’s just too hard to find interesting bits between ads for escorts and phone sex. Ultimately, I’d just ask Scott which restaurants are good.

We still subscribe to the Sunday Star Tribune. I don’t know why. Tradition mostly. Sunday mornings sound less comfortable without it.

Each Sunday, I sort the paper before going through it. Mentally – if not physically -culling out stories I don’t care about, already read elsewhere, non-MN-based, and syndicated. On the top of the remaining stack I place the weekly flyers to 4-5 of our local big box retailers and the comics. That’s what I page through over coffee. The rest goes straight to the recycling bin. What would it take to have weekly ad flyers delivered to me without an OP/ED page associated with it? (I’m all for commercial messages. It’s just not needed to subsidize the publications anymore)

In actuality, all these publications are ad-delivery devices. The publishers are ad publishers not news publishers or otherwise. As I’ve asked before, I’d don’t know why the publications aren’t 100% advertising. Seems like a win-win for everyone. Publications won’t need to worry about financing original content and advertisers get lots and lots of full page ads, just like what MSP/St.Paul Magazine is doing.

There’s a number of reasons’ ad-based models are a bad idea

1. It’s not interesting.
2. In highly niche, über-segmented markets, the difference between a commercial message and a non-commercial message is nil.
3. Pageviews are irrelevant – RSS subscriptions will surpass pageviews in a year if not sooner.
4. But really this is why:
   

   “MySpace can’t sell attention to advertisers because the site itself HAS NONE. Nobody pays attention to MySpace — users pay attention to each other, and compete for each other’s attention — it’s as if the site itself doesn’t exist.” – Scott Karp

If media darling MySpace can’t monetize pageviews with advertising who can? RocketBoom?

They pulled in $40k for a week of spots in their first eBay ad auction. I agree with Dave Winer that there success is like the success of the MillionDollarHomepage, it’s something that can only happen a small number of times.

MNteractive doesn’t pull in $1200/month (I suspect it pulls in much, much more) and it’s full of ads – product placement and otherwise.

UPDATE 30 May 2006
Seth Godin asks the same question and how is this RocketBoom anything but an ad?