It seems simple enough, pick up the phone and call the #1 website in your region to secure your advertising campaign.  You can’t go wrong with buying inventory from the biggest website in the area, right?  WRONG!

It is a common misconception in the online advertising world that biggest is best.  While the biggest websites do attract a huge audience and garner millions of page views – you have to dissect those numbers to see if they can actually translate into sales for you.  You must be educated in placing online advertising on the large websites and these simple steps can help you place ads on any website.

Questions to ask:

1. How much of your traffic is out of state?  Or out of my sales geography?
   It is common for large websites to have between 30%-60% of their total traffic out-of-state.  If you have an e-commerce website and your product is applicable to consumers out of your traditional drive distance; then this can work to your benefit.  Sites will often charge a premium for Geo-Targeted inventory
2. What are your traffic patterns?
3. Do you have a high bounce rate?
   This usually means that the site is messy, confusing to navigate and/or long load times and consumers lose patience and leave quickly.
4. How many pages per visitor does your site average?
   Are users willing to read through the site, dig a little deeper and stay a little longer?  For online advertising to be effective you need to achieve a solid frequency number; traditionally, the consumer needs to see your ad several times before they interact with it.
5. What are the websites top performing sections/pages?
   One of the biggest misconceptions about large websites is that the Homepage is the place to be!  Most Homepages are the worst performing pages of the site in regards to ROI for ad placement; users land on the Homepage and quickly navigate away from the page to read top articles and visit their favorite sections.  It is common to visit a Homepage and be served large ads, intrusive ads or ads that wrap the entire site (wallpaper ads).  These ads are a premium cost and often times only run for one day.  An entire ad budget for 30-days can be spent on a one-day campaign.Almost every large website has niche pages/sections that have solid numbers in traffic patterns; more pages viewed, more loyal audience, longer time spent reading those pages.  Dig deeper into your ad buying to familiarize yourself with the website.
6. Will my ad be seen?
   One of the most frustrating components of display advertising is the number of ads that appear below the fold (so far down the page that over half of all visitors never see the ad!)  Ensure you have confirmed your ad placement for the entire campaign.   Remember, you pay for an ad when it ‘appears’ on a page NOT when a visitor to the site ‘sees’ the ad.Match content/demographics with ads as much as possible!The best ROI in advertising is when you can match up your message with the content/vehicle that is delivering your message.  Within most large websites, you can break down the site to find your target audience; work to place your message in front of your audience!
   Confirm the sections/pages your ad will run.  The large sites are receiving high page views from various low performing sections:  blogs/opinion pages, comments pages, classifieds.  Ensure your ad is placed on quality pages.

Analyze, Re-target, Report, Test & REPEAT!

Always gather data on any campaign you run!

• Know the traffic numbers of the sites/sections running your message
• Analyze the data gathered from your own reporting (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc).
• Gather additional data (phone tracking, in-store sales, walk-in traffic, SEO, Paid Search)
• Test different ad placements, new messaging, new sites, etc as you go.  Don’t throw the entire budget into a ‘test’ phase; but create a small portion of the campaign that is always testing new ideas and theories.
• Repeat!  Online advertising is the place to be – don’t pull your budget because the campaign didn’t run exactly as expected.  Learn from your data and continue to place better, more educated campaigns.

At HyperX, we understand that buying online display advertising is not a simple process.  We have put in the work to already know where your ads will be the most successful – it isn’t on one website but hundreds of websites.  We have built an exclusive network of over 250 websites for Utah advertisers.  We will help you create a custom campaign that will hit your target audience!  Our network has 100% inventory above-the-fold, 100% Utah traffic (out-of-state is available upon request), customized channels (Sports, Religion/LDS, News, Blogs, Outdoor/Recreation, etc), campaign is optimized daily.  If you ad is not performing on a particular website, channel or ad unit – we’ll optimize that out of the campaign.  We are working for you, every day, to find the highest performing websites and ad units.  To learn more about our display advertising product and services, call 801.566.0670.