Alastair Thompson talks to Jon Ostler of “The Performance Network”
The online advertising industry continues to mature with the launch of NZ’s first “performance-based” advertising network. The Performance Network (TPN), soft-launched in March this year by First Rate founder Jon Ostler, was, he says, “in response to demands by advertisers and publishers for new advertising options”.
First Rate has become a Google Gadget Ad developer to pioneer the development of gadget ads in New Zealand. First Rate is a direct response, online marketing agency that provides online strategy, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing and performance-based online advertising and tracking services direct to a range of clients across Australasia, including ING, Yellow Pages, APN, Rabo Plus and Roses Only. First Rate has offices in Auckland and Sydney.
“Do you know what your competition is doing and if it’s working?”
Identify and analyse your online competition then devise strategies and tactics to out-manoeuvre them. Learn from their successes and failures and put into place a cost effective strategy that will be assured of success. Understand your industry online and be sure that your business plans will work online.
“55% of all online purchases originate from Search Engines as opposed to only 9% from banners”
Site content needs to be presented to search engines in a very specific but subtle way in order to achieve top rankings for popular search phrases. The technical process of adjusting a site’s content and html is called search engine optimisation. For the rankings to be achieved, a good online reputation is required. For traffic to be generated the correct phrases must be targeted. To achieve the maximum business benefit, the site’s usability and business strategy must be well planned and executed.
Search Engine Advertising is the placement of small text advertisements on search engines. Google Adwords and Overture Pay-for-Performance Search are the two most well known players. On Google the text ads appear at the top of the results and on the right hand side under the heading ‘Sponsored Links’. Overture syndicates its ads to other search engines like Yahoo where they appear at the top of the page and are under the heading ‘Sponsor Results’.
Imagine you owned a retail outlet and that everyone who came into your store was kind enough to complete a customer questionnaire for you.
In this imaginary world, time wouldn’t be an issue. You could ask a whole lot of questions, such as how people had heard about your store, where they’d just come from, if they’d been to your store before, and what sort of thing they were looking for when they came to you.
How does a search engine know that your site is important?
The web is based on the interconnection of websites via hyperlinks. After search engines, links from other sites are the most popular method of finding new websites. Not only do people use these links to visit new websites but search engines use the number and quality of these links to determine the “online reputation” of a site and then ranks them accordingly.
Online, banner ads are the closest thing to offline advertising as they contain a high degree of creative and reach a large audience. Mainly for this reason they have dominated online advertising budgets over the past few years. However they are far more powerful than offline advertising as they can be interactive and be placed in real time allowing rapid A/B testing. Unfortunately due to their cost and consumer behavior online they can produce poor ROI if used inappropriately.