Where O' Where Should My Advertising Dollars Go?

Chic Black & White Clean Shopper

Deciding where to spend my advertising dollars used to be so simple. Print or more print? In fact, back in the day (sometime around the Cretaceous period), I worked with three national print publications and called it a day. My phone rang off the hook. I was living in La-La land and didn’t even know it.

Now, thanks to the explosive growth of the internet, there’s a blog/website/twitter/facebook option for every fetish and an advertising campaign to match. I don’t have the latest figures, but one statistic I happened upon recently quoted the number of blogs on the internet at 112 million. And that figure was from 2007! I haven’t even bothered to look up websites, but my guess is I couldn’t count that high anyway. How do you pick from all the possible sources and find an advertising solution that gives you a good bang for your rapidly weakening buck? Honestly? I don’t really know.

Chic Black & White Clean Diner

Yesterday, I was fortunate to participate in a fabulous Search Engine Webinar hosted by The Momentrepreneur Support Group. I learned how to dissect my Analytics report (something my generationally-challenged brain should have internalized some time ago) and discovered that visitors from my site are overwhelmingly coming to us through organic Google searches (vs those organizations to whom I shell out ornate sums of money), and another big chunk are coming to us because kindly sites refer them (i.e. consumerreports.org, germfreaksguide.com, thegiggleguide.com, etc.). In fact, only a very small percentage of visitors to my site (4%) are actually biting on the paid-search fruit.

If 75% of visitors are coming to our site from online searches and referring sites, what does that mean for my print campaigns?

Chic Black & White Bib

Does that mean my print ads are a waste of my already devalued dollar? Or did my customers read the ads, forget the cleanshopper.com URL and search for Clean Shopper shopping cart covers under our keywords? Apparently, there’s an “app” for figuring that out somewhere, but I haven’t found it yet.

Through a nifty tracking mechanism we installed on the site, we can occassionally track how successful our print ads are, but the stars have to be aligned and it can’t snow. Tough in those winter months. So far, we have found a mixture of five trade and consumer print publications that appear to work for us, but not nearly the way those organic searches or referrals do.

The print publications that have found a way to increase their viability stand out. They incorporate FREE links, website banners and other cyber bribes that extend the life of our print ads and give our campaigns longer legs. And who wouldn’t like longer legs?

Taking those five print publications and adding them to the list of over 112 million blogs and countless websites may not make me more cyber-ad savvy than T-Rex, but I’m at least learning how to find my way back to La-La land.