Converting Traditional Advertising to Online Advertising

How can I convert local newspaper rates to online rates for my site?

[Robster]

There seems to be quite a bit of debate about the transition from traditional to online advertising. There are many schools of thought regarding the terminology, the metrics, and how to convert old school ideas into this thing we call the internet.

My background isn’t marketing or advertising, so I’m learning as I go. My first experience was trying to sell local advertising for my college based web site to local advertisers. I visited the school paper posing as a potential advertiser (well, maybe someday I’ll buy some ads, so I don’t consider it deceitful) and got the ad rates.

I rushed home booted up my pc, got into Excel and started off into converting the newspaper rates into CPM rates. Here’s the info I had to go on:

The paper had multiple size formats, so I just used the medium-small size which was about $46 a week. There are 11,000 copies of the paper printed, and I’m not sure of the number that are actually read. So, Excel tells me that 46/11000 = .00418 for a CPM of $4.18

So, what’s the problem? Well I started to wonder… Should I compare this to my site’s impressions, or unique visitors? When someone picks up the newspaper do they get multiple impressions of the ad on a page? Another problem: What if the average # of pages each person looks at is only 75% of the newspaper? Well, those ads were never seen… never an impression at all!

I’ve also tried to work at it from another point of view by guessing the click through rate and conversion rate of a local business’s ads, and determine a CPM that would make it cost effective for them to advertise. I probably couldn’t charge a $15 cpm, or even a $5 cpm because my analysis seems to show that it wouldn’t be cost effective for the advertiser ( see my other post: [webmasterworld.com...] )

So, what’s a student to do? Here’s what I’d love to find, but in all my searching haven’t yet discovered:

1)A site with clear descriptions on how to convert traditional advertising to online advertising.
2)Actual industry advertising rates (CPM, CTR, etc.)
3)Actual industry newspaper rates (scope, reach, frequency, conversion, etc.)

Thanks!

Rob

[Drastic]

Comparing traditional advertising to internet advertising is a difficult task, sparking many debates. They really are different animals, IMO.

I think rating offline campaigns in terms of CPM is probably not going to be very accurate - views of print ad are going to be difficult to determine. The best way to gauge any campaign (and compare different ones), is to figure your ROI.

Throw X amount of dollars at given method/campaign and see what you get back. Then you know whether to chunk it, tweak it and try again, or roll with it. Tracking your efforts makes all the difference.

CPM is not the end-all be-all. It's just a single gauge and is best used in tandem with other stats like CPC, EPV, ROI, etc.