Jeff Jarvis shared a bit of wisdom from the Wall Street Journal yesterday that paints an ugly picture for the future of print advertising. From the Wall Street Journal:
In the first six months of the program, Ms. Bouthillet says, the search-engine ads delivered 5,250 applicants, at an average cost of $4. By contrast, Baylor paid an average of $30 for each of the 3,125 applicants who came via job boards, and $750 each for the 215 applicants who replied to a newspaper or magazine ad.
If you wrangle that into a spreadsheet…and I’m sure I’ve done my math wrong in here somewhere, so feel free to correct me in the comments, but we find that the Google/Search ad campaign is 768% more effective than the print ad campaign.
Here’s my logic:
With those kinds of numbers, why would you buy a print ad?
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I’d like to see a study about the effectiveness of search ads in smaller markets. Does search scale down well enough yet to yield the same or similar economic benefits to businesses with a smaller geographic reach?
I agree, ad styles will have different effectiveness in different size markets, and I don’t have any data offhand that shows it for smaller publishers, but I know that at my day job in Redmond we rely exclusively on google ads, e-mail, and direct mail.
We’ve never bothered with display advertising because it’s just laughably inefficient when we’re trying to sell conference seats.
I’d like to here more about the quality of the respondents. Were the search applicants just as qualified as the newspaper respondents?
How small of a market, Seth?
I’d bet a yoga studio in a local city would see comparable results (% wise) as this. Doesn’t get much smaller than that.
I get the idea search ads maybe more efficient especially down the road, but I would like to see the conversion rates of those applicants though.
Also, what if you had a value of 0.1 on the search applicants and a value of 100 on the print applicants. Then the ends do justify the means.
The Truth, John Doe – both good questions. I’ve e-mailed Sarah Needleman (author of the WSJ article) to see if she has any more information on the topic. My guess is: no response, but we’ll see…
Interesting figures, but I have to say I disagree with the choice of the headline stat. That’s a comparison of the total cost of each campaign, without regard to the cost per applicant – which is the real statistic that matters. On that count, Google is 18,750% more effective than print!
Michael – Our markets tend to be in the 5,000-15,000 pop. and then 50,000-150,000 pop. ranges.
Matt – You’re right! I could have been more sensational! Drat!