Blog Ads Expand Search Inventory

By: Bruce Clay, June 2006

Blogs are a dynamic medium that promote conversation and are part of the consumer movement toward user control. An increasing number of people are reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, influencing the way people use the Web. Consumers are no longer content to be passive receivers of information. Blogs give everyone a voice, allowing consumers to be active participants in marketing and to sometimes call the shots.

Blogs have experienced rapid growth because they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas on the Web. Millions more then blog their own thought on these ideas, allowing the blogosphere to spread like wildfire. Some blogs have become very influential, especially political blogs. Some are authoritative with a huge audience while others are personal for family and friends.

A Pew/Internet study estimated that 50 million Internet users (about 11 percent) are regular blog readers. Blog search engine Technorati has data indicating that 75,000 new blogs are launched each day. Bloggers create approximately 1.2 million posts daily, resulting in about 50,000 blog updates per hour in Technorati.

Advertising in Blogs

You can advertise on blogs through blog ad networks such as Blogads, AdBrite, FeedBurner, WeblogsInc and CrispAds, to name a few.

Advertisers can get run-of-network or run-of-site graphical ads on a cost-per-click basis, as well as keyword-based text ads. Some services will let you upload your own ads directly, advertising across categories and using third-party ad tracking to monitor stats in real time.

Google AdSense distributes blog ads matched to the characteristics and interests of the blog site. Yahoo! offers blog advertising through its Yahoo! Publisher Network. As yet, Microsoft does not provide blog advertising options but is almost certainly working on it.

Creating Blog Ads

Blog advertising differs from other types of online advertising. It requires ads that are honest and connect with the audience. The usual attention grabbers won't work. You need to address a specific audience and ensure your landing page matches that audience's expectations.

The best ads are entertaining, informative and edgy. You can't talk down to the audience, and you must let them know that you are part of the community. Make sure your message delivers value. This is a highly educated and sophisticated audience. They won't respond to ad-speak but will take notice of a quality, well-targeted message.

Consumer Control

By now, everyone is familiar with the concept of consumer control in advertising. This phenomenon begs for a paradigm shift because of its influence on how ads are created and the way they are distributed. RSS feeds and blogs have contributed to consumer control by virtue of consumer selection for delivery. This makes consumers the gatekeepers for ads served. Since this is a highly selective audience, in order to please, advertisers must create ads that inform without sounding like a pitch. Ads should tell a story that piques user interest.

Blog advertising can outperform other online advertising strategies, sometimes yielding an 8 percent click-through rate (Pheedo Network). However, these results require highly specialized planning and effective execution in order to leverage the consumer control factor to ensure campaign success.

Creative Freshness

If consumers had a vote, they would demand fresh ads informing them of new and interesting products without over-repetition. Most consumers don't mind advertising, per se. But they do resent being captive to noisy ads with relentless repetition. The constant recycling of the same tired TV ads, over and over, bores consumers and causes them to tune out most advertising. In fact, many people invest in work-arounds to avoid TV ads altogether (TiVo, DVRs, etc.).

Why do advertisers create such ads? It seems that ad creative must do the outrageous to grab attention because of ad clutter. While being outrageous may grab attention, it also turns off consumers because they realise they're being played, and the message is usually irrelevant to their needs. This creates a negative reaction that intensifies as the ads are repeated ad nauseum. If the ads were interesting and non-repetitive, most consumers would not object to viewing them. Better still, if they could ignore irrelevant ads and view only those of interest, this would be the best of both worlds. This aspiration is becoming a reality on the Web.

Blog content is continually updated; therefore, blog ads must be updated regularly to be effective. A rule of thumb for advertisers is to change the creative for every six new posts on the feed. That's because the RSS environment is based on real-time freshness itself and stale ads in the feeds will decrease click-through rates. No matter how interesting the content of the ads, if they are not periodically refreshed with new copy, they will lose effectiveness and will be overlooked. Thus advertisers must update the creative and keep it fresh.

Feed Selection

Content delivery with RSS feeds varies depending on the feed and the forum used to view the feeds. My Yahoo! displays only headlines, whereas Bloglines displays all available feed text. There are also variations among publishers. Some provide the entire text of an item within their content feeds, while others provide only partial text. The latter option forces a click-through to the publisher site to read the entire news feed item. Because of these variations, marketers must be aware of how content is presented before they can create an effective blog ad campaign.

One factor worth exploring is full-text versus partial-text. For example, if a publication has high readership and the publisher offers partial text of each article in the feed, this means many readers will go to the website for the information without viewing the other ads in the feed. While readership may be high, this publication may not be a good option for advertisers because the ads can be ignored. On the other hand, another publication with fewer subscribers, but providing full text feeds, may deliver more clicks on an ad. It is important to test and evaluate potential feeds for your ads to determine suitability for your campaigns.

Relationship Building

It is important to create a relationship with potential customers. Blog advertising provides a compelling platform for building relationships with readers. Blogs are strictly opt-in, and consumers return on a regular basis. This gives advertisers the ability to communicate with them over time on a deep level.

With well targeted, relevant content, in the creative, your ads can really address the interests of the reader. The target audience will attentively read your content. Serial story telling works well. Selling is a turn-off.

Audience Selection

With blog advertising, you have to recognize that although the audience may be small, it will be extremely targeted. Therefore, precise execution is a must. Compared to other types of online marketing such as email, blog advertising couldn't be more different. With email you want a wide reach; with blog advertising, you want to zero in on a small market segment.

For instance, if Toyota wanted to promote its latest Prius hybrid, it might target online publications such as automotive and environmental sites. However, when advertising across multiple categories, the creative must change based on the audience. The automotive site readers might be interested in performance, whereas the environmental site readers might be interested in how hybrids benefit the environment. The message must be targeted to be effective.

Blog advertising is in a nascent stage, and audiences are generally small, well-informed early adopters. Blog ads can hit the mark with targeting by specifically defining the audience. When this is done correctly, marketers can realise high click-through and conversion rates that provide an excellent ROI.

Of course, the key point to understand is that all these marketing tactics are useless if the ads are appearing next to anything less than real, unique and interesting blog content. People are attracted to information, not ads. Make sure that you are choosing your advertising partners carefully or you are just throwing money away.