When I helped develop a website for the Round Rock Express two years ago, there was no advertising on the site. Here was a company making a few million bucks off of advertising and ticket sales every season, yet they weren't even interested in formulating a plan for the site.
When told there could be money in the site, some of the sales folks scoffed. You try selling something that no one cares about to people.
So we began tracking the hits, visits, unique visits and so on. It turns out, people were reading the site. In 2007, just before we launched our new design, we drew about 5 million hits and around 30,000 unique visitors a month. That number alone compared with ad space we were already selling on our radio station for $1,500 a pop.
When the relaunch was completed, we began averaging closer to 10 million hits and 60,000 uniques a month. And the ad men came through. In the first year, we sold out of ad content and reached nearly $70,000 in sales ... a big leap from zero.
As we went along, we learned that advertisers were interested in click-throughs, unique visitors (you can't click through a billboard, but you can brand it, right?), interactivity and ad placement. All of those are trackable or explainable using software or online programs.
Through that, we also learned that while hits sound cool, no one cares anymore. Hits tend to measure the purposeful with the accidental. The repeat with the unique.
No comments:
Post a Comment