Google recently began buying ad pages in technology magazines, including PC Magazine and Maximum PC, and reselling those pages--cut into quarters or fifths--to small advertisers that already belong to its online ad network, dubbed AdWords.
[adsbygoogle.com...]
Brilliant move on Google's part. Print advertising arbitraged to PPC. It'll be interesting to see what the performance is, and how much per click/call the print ad costs.
"I would be surprised and somewhat disappointed if they were to spend a lot of money and resources on a print advertising unit," said Safa Rashtchy, senior Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray. "My guess is it is just an experiment."
Safa, are you so blind that you can't see the beauty of this?
This is interesting.
Not sure what I think of it yet - but interesting.
Syzygy
"It's a lot of exposure for cheap," he said, adding that Google is "doing a ton of tracking on this. They're using their own 1-800 numbers on this, and it forwards to our line."(my bold)
So Google is also experimenting with tracking for an eventual Pay Per Call system? I'd love to have an 800 number as another line in my adwords creatives.
Very interesting.
I thought the verdict was in a long time ago: people do not move from their books, magazines or TV's to their computers to type in a link that they've seen. Maybe times have changed, or maybe that's why there's a phone number to call instead...
ever heard of PR(not page rank)? A decent placement in a A-list magazine or newspaper is worth $100,000's for the right business. I'd take a spot a mention in NewsWeek over the #1 spot in google,MSN & yahoo any day of the week.
Pay Per Call
Having been on the corproate side of marketing, I can tell you those poor guys and gals still selling print are in a tough business. Execs don't want to pay $9,000 for a full color print ad and have to buy it in a package that requires 7 months or more of advertising.
I can't count the times someone selling me a print ad package from a magazine (and yeah, they have to package them now with other marketing "freebies" to make customers bite) said, "you have to advertise at least 7 times in print to get the message out."
Problem is, it's hard to track the success of a print ad. Some try with a unique landing page url as part of the print ad, but the nature of it is not as results oriented as pay per click or search in general.
Next obvious thing for Google would be to then also allow one to track phone calls with a unique 800 number they'll provide, so that they can also report to you the success of your print ad - should a customer pick up the phone and call.
Or just charge per minute or per call?
In any case, really looking forward to it what comes out of Mountain View next...
Or does it go straight to your site? If so, how does Google cover the $5000/month cost of the mag ad based on a $2.50 per/click adword (say they put in 10 ads = $25.50 they made at 1 click/ad for the mag placement) that they cannot track?
How do you get on this amazingly short list (considering how many zillion adword subscribers are out there)? Lottery winner?
Sounds like a gimmick and just in 5 minutes I poked a ton of holes in this "deal". Pony up proof -- someone scan a page from a mag they got. Better yet, someone scan a page from a mag with THEIR adword ad on it!
The page is subtly an ad for Google and Google AdWords as well as for the included advertisers. You generally don't see "Ads by J Walter Thompson" or whatever in a magazine ad. Google is turning its (mandatory) serps page advertising identification into a slogan... absolutely brilliant. Google is also going to be able to get all sorts of tracking data out of this.
When I first saw the thread, I'd actually envisioned plain boxed text ads down the right hand side of the page. Might be another format that they should test. ;)
Gread find!
Pay Per CallNow thats an idea that I like!
It has been common practise for quite a while to use a seperate 800 number in print ads to track how well the ad worked. We currently have five 800 numbers that we use in rotation for different ad projects. One is used on the website that gets the PPC ads, another is used on postcards that we mail out, and yet another is on the brochures that we send to the people that are dealers for our product. The 800 number only cost $5 per month each, so it is quite reasonable to pursue this method.
By comparing the number of calls in to the cost of the promotion, we can determine the cost-per-call. This sounds like another interesting tweak that I would love to try. Too bad that it is not likely that Google will do it in my industry :)
I'm getting tired of all these companies trying to lock customers and stiffle competition with ridiculous patents. Their objective goes against free business.
It has been common practise for quite a while to use a seperate 800 number in print ads to track how well the ad worked.
True dat. We have a bunch of different 800 numbers to figure out which websites and publications we own/advertise in are pulling the call traffic. Excellent correlation you made there.
Whoever sells 800 numbers to businesses, you better start moving in on this sweet deal...
Header and footer text slightly different from the first ad. Perhaps most interesting is that the header, which is now in bold, now says:
"Visit adsbygoogle.com/pcmag to learn more about these products and services."
When you go to the Ads by Google page, the page is essentially the same as what's online, but with live links. Each link takes you to the advertiser's page via a redirect with url in this form...
http //www.googlesyndication.com/url?q=http //advertiser.com&sa=3DX
Not all ads have 800 numbers, but where there aren't 800 numbers there are special landing pages. Everybody's doing a lot of tracking on this, and it almost looks like the whole thing's set up to test various combinations and permutations.
When you go to the Ads by Google page, the page is essentially the same as what's online, but with live links....
The above should read: "When you go to the Ads by Google page, the page is essentially the same as what's in the magazine, but with live links...."
