Modern Day Mad Men: An Experiment in Online vs. Print Ads
By Sam Adolphsen
Published on Tuesday, December 20, 2011
SPN NEWS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011
Don Draper had it easy: Come up with a clever ad and choose print, TV, and/or radio. Lucky for him, Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet yet, and the constant battle of "online versus everything else" didn't rear its head when deciding where to allot a limited advertising budget.
The idea recently surfaced to use advertising placed in newspapers to drive traffic to The Maine Heritage Policy Center's online research. This represented a good opportunity to see how print ads performed compared with online ads in terms of driving traffic.
The Center's newspaper advertisements ran for three days. They were designed specifically to push people to visit our website. Placing the ads in the newspaper cost roughly $2,700. Using Google Analytics, we compared the average visitors to our Website per day over the last two months. When this was compared with the average visitors to our site for the three-day period that the newspaper ads ran, we were pleased to see that traffic had just about doubled.
Good, right? Maybe.
When the price of the ads is compared with the actual number of "additional" visitors (250), the cost was $10.80 per additional website visitor.
Of course, this doesn't take into count intangible benefits like brand exposure, which certainly has some value. However, speaking simply in terms of traffic, online advertising bested traditional print advertising.
One online campaign that the Center ran (Facebook and online newspaper ads) yielded much better, and less expensive, results. In a two-week period, our Facebook and online newspaper ads increased traffic to our website by 371 percent. The cost? The online newspaper ads cost $1.64 per click, the Facebook ads were $.65 per click.
Quick Summary
Newspaper ads - doubled website traffic at more than $10 per visitor.
Facebook and online advertising - 371% increase in website traffic at an average cost of $1.15 per visitor.
This is just one experimental and unscientific example of print versus online advertising. For most of us, it's intuitive that online ads are the way to go if you want increased web traffic, but not everyone understands that.
Do you have an example of the difference in effectiveness of, or price between, online and print ads? Do you have trouble getting the folks in charge of your organizational budget to allot enough to online ads? Send an email to Nicole Williams (Nicole@ogfcommunity.com) and we will add it to the growing reference materials at OGFCommunity.com.
Sam Adolphsen is director of the Center for Open Government at The Maine Heritage Policy Center. Write him at sam@mainepolicy.org.
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