Hey everyone! It’s Caitlin – the “new girl” on the Design*Sponge Ad team. Before I introduce myself, here are some things you might want to know about me:

1. I love looking at things. Any and all things. The brighter, the better.
2. I love advertising. My dream dinner party guest list includes Marshall McLuhan, commercial artist era Andy Warhol, Milton Glaser (a long time faculty member at my alma mater School of Visual Arts), Rhoda and quite possibly Jon Hamm from Mad Men just for fun.
3. I like analysis. I love to take a peek behind the scenes and try to get a glimpse into the hows and whys of just about everything. This makes time management a bit challenging at times but over the years I have becomes skilled in developing priorities based on my criteria du jour.

So when Design*Sponge put the word out about an available Advertising team opportunity I nearly spit my coffee all over my computer. Why? Because I knew all those internet breaks I’d taken with my favorite blog (D*S) along with my day job skills (producing endless spreadsheets of forecast and performance reports) were coming together perfectly for this job. I applied and to my excitement- I got the job!

I have always been lucky enough to work with quality innovative content.  From Bloomberg Business News where I began my career as a Production Manager to The Charlie Rose Show where I directed some amazing shows, it was all about providing a great user experience at the end of the day.  When I decided it was time to seek greener pastures (literally), I packed my bags after 17 years in NYC and moved back to my hometown, the oldest town in West Virginia – Shepherdstown.  I combined my loves and skill sets and opened a vintage clothing and housewares boutique and grew a successful small business that got some great national press.  And after a few years, I felt myself yearning to advise people on more than the most outrageous maxi for a summer outdoor festival or the  best vintage tea set to impress the European in-laws.  I wanted to be back in the analysis game, back to providing information that supported growth so I accepted a position within the digital team at a fair sized local newspaper and set about bringing the advertising team up to speed on digital marketing and products.  Not only was I re-educating print people on then web 2.0, I was back to advising on online campaign strategies, digital opportunities and product arrays, I was down and dirty is the set-up, operation and scheduling with the ad server, email marketing platform and running their social media presence. It felt good to be back.

Three years later, D*S entered my life professionally and well, I couldn’t be happier.  It is awesome to use the skills I use everyday but to do it for a site and community of readers and advertisers I have had a long relationship with.  And looking at ad stats for gorgeous handmade items or top design industry products is a welcome task in my world!
Our goal on the D*S Advertising team is to best serve our readers and to best serve our advertisers. It is really that simple. So we love questions and really desire to achieve the best outcome for the ads we have on our site because it is a real indicator that we are serving our readers also.

The name of this blog “Building a Better Advertiser” truly expresses our goal because we’d love our advertisers to soak up what we know about our site and readers. When that happens, our advertisers are working with the best information to create an ad experience for our readers that they’ll love and respond to. And that really is a better advertiser.

That’s my introduction to me and why I feel so at home here on the Advertising team at Design*Sponge. I look forward to working with all you you very soon.  And stay tuned to this blog for my upcoming series called Advertising Mysteries Solved – FAQ Answered Right Here, Right Now.  Here is a sneak peek at the topics we’ll cover:  Dollars and Sense:  How to best spend your marketing dollars at D*S,Size versus Positioning:  Is bigger really better?, and Converting Your Clicks Into Sales:  3 tips to get you started.

I know Aaron is working on a post for you about Ad Serving and what it’s about, but in the meantime, let’s learn a little bit about the different targeting options you will often have when you advertise online.

For the most part, the biggest options you’ll find concern when and where your ad will appear.

Targeting your ad to a specific time or place can be a very useful tool for creating a successful campaign, but like most things in online advertising — it’s the way that you choose to use it that will determine whether or not it is effective (or worth it).

Geo-targeting: this when your ad is shown only in specific geographic locations.

This kind of targeting is the most intuitive for advertisers to understand. There are many circumstances when it is necessary to use geo-targeting.
• If you have a brick and mortar store with no on-line capabilities.
• If you are promoting a live event in a specific region.
• If you do on-line business and know that most of your customers come from a certain region or country (or you have shipping constraints).

Trap to avoid: over targeting. Many times people get a little too hung up on saying they ONLY want their ad to appear within a certain radius of their physical store because most of their sales happen in person.

Here are some things to think about before you put unnecessary constraints on your ability to generate revenue:

1. If you have an online store, and the ability to show your products to a large audience that will be receptive to your products, why would you want to limit your exposure to that audience to a small segment?
2. If you are a brick and mortar store with no online presence, a geo-targeted ad often makes perfect sense, but sometimes we see advertisers get a little too specific.  IE, I’m a store in Brooklyn, and I only want my ad on Design*Sponge to show in Brooklyn.  Why?  We have readers all over the city!  Don’t design fans sometimes make trips to Brooklyn?  And when they do – don’t you want them to know that you exist?  In general, it’s good to try to target the greater metro area of the city your brick and mortar store is if you MUST geo-target.

Day-parting: this when your ad is served only on specific days or times.

This kind of targeting is a bit trickier. I mostly recommend it for advertisers who are trying to appeal to a very specific audience. An example might be if you were advertising a food or cooking related product and wanted to advertise on Fridays on Design*Sponge when recipes are posted.

Again, this is pretty advanced and not usually reccomended for anyone to do at first.  The best way to make good use of day-parting is as follows:

1. Begin by showing your ad at ALL days and times.
2. Look at your campaign’s performance data to see what time of day (and on what days) you get the most clicks on your ad. (What to look for – when is the CTR highest? When is the click volume highest?  Is that at the same time?)
3. Cross check this with your analytics data to make sure you are also getting the most sales (or conversions) at these times as well.

If you are buying a CPM based campaign, where you are paying for each impression – this can be an effective tactic to maximize the value of your budget by showing your ads only when they are most likely to get clicks. Not bad!

Frequency Capping: this is when your ad is served only a specific number of times per viewer, usually within a 24 hour or 7-day period.

This kind of targeting is best used sparingly as it can dramatically limit the reach and effectiveness of your campaigns.  However, if you have solid data that shows that if a user hasn’t clicked on your ad after X number of impressions, they won’t ever click (this is usually only known to advertisers who use their OWN adserver – so if you don’t, then this targeting option is not reccomended.)  But sometimes people are afraid of people burning out on their banners and they want to stretch their budget, so they use frequency capping.

Pros: It definitely increases the number of unique views of your ad.

Cons: It also decreases the number of times any unique viewer will see it.  Therefore, it often decreases the brand recognition that occurs when advertisers see your ad on a regular basis without clicking on it.

Targeting is a valuable tool and definitely an option to discuss with your ad sales representative to see if there is something that could help your campaign. It is often worth experimenting with targeting, but to always be vigilant about watching the results. Targeting can help to stretch a tight budget, but it can also close some doors if not used in a strategic manner. Never be afraid to ask your ad sales rep lots of questions so that you’re sure that you understand the impact of any targeting decisions you make.

Begin by asking yourself a few questions about WHY you want to advertise in the first place.

Are you advertising to:

• To improve your sales?
• To increase brand awareness?To sell one particular product or bring attention to a sale, event or opportunity?

When you’ve really thought about this, you’ve determined the purpose of your campaign. A good start!

Now, it’s time to get to some specifics:

• What would a successful campaign look like for you? (How many clicks, sales, leads, etc.)
• What is your time line for achieving this goal?
• Is this a short term goal?
• What would these goals look like in the long term?

Once you think about these goals and have an idea about what you would like to get out of your campaign, it’s important that you share them with the site(s) you plan on advertising with.

Help us help you! If we don’t know what you’re trying to do, we can’t make use of what we know to help you succeed.

Remember, we know our audience better than anyone, and we’ve seen hundreds of advertisers run campaigns – many of which had similar goals as you did.  It’s safe to assume that we have a better idea of what works than most.

This doesn’t mean we’ll have all the answers, but we can definitely  help to make suggestions about how to meet these goals and give you tips on how to get started.

When thinking about the goals for your campaign, REMEMBER:

1. Be realistic. This is also something that the sites you advertise on can help with. It is good to start out with big goals, but also know that sometimes advertising is a combination of trial, error and commitment. Set out goals you can meet and then revisit/revise these goals frequently.
2. Think strategically about the sites that are the best fit for your business and your goals. Pay attention to who your audience is and ask sites who their audience is.
3. Advertising is an investment in your business. It costs money to have a successful campaign.
4. Be thoughtful about designing your creatives. Download and read our free report. Talk with your designer. Take advantage of programs that optimize creatives (you can display multiple creatives and the program will serve the ad that gets the most clicks most frequently.) Switch out ads often and be willing to try new things. Readers of design sites thrive on visual stimulation and are curious about new images.
5. Advertising takes patience. So if you’re first ad or campaign doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean that “advertising” won’t work for you.  There are a LARGE number of things that you can test to improve your campaign such as: ads, sites you advertise on, landing pages, offers, and much more.

We will talk more in the weeks to come about how to think more about your goals during and after your campaign.

If you can have clear goals set up before your campaign, you are off to a good start!

It’s called “The Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts of Creating Ads for Design Sites.”

It started based on some internal conversations we were having when we were trying to come up with a good answer to one of the most common questions we got from new advertisers – “what works?”

To figure out a good answer, we started researching.

We went through the performance data of ALL the ads that ran on Design*Sponge over the past year, digging through the data for trends.

The key questions we set out to answer were:

• What did the ads that performed the best have in common?
• What did the ads that didn’t do so well have in common?

You can get a copy of it here.

(You might also be able to get it from that form on the right…)

Read it, and let us know what you think in the comments!

Thanks!

The Design*Sponge Ad Team

For example, on Design*Sponge, if you advertised with us for a month, your ad would likely be seen more than 7 million times. That’s a lot of times! And it sounds like a lot of times. But if your ad is seen 7 million times, how often can you expect your ad to get clicked on? 20%? 10%? What if it is a really good ad? 30%?

NO.

Above average click thru rates are not in the 10-30% range. They are not even in the 1-3% range. That’s right– an amazingly successful ad on a design site will likely not even have a click thru rate of 1%. According to industry standards, your ad is doing above average if its click thru rate is above .1%. Talk about sounding small.

How could that be true? Well, how many websites do you look at a day? How many times do you go to Google? The NYTimes? Facebook? Weather.com? Or maybe you are like me and have a fondness for sites with pictures of cute animals on them (I’ll see you over at Cute Overload in a few minutes!). Just think about how many times a day you look at Design*Sponge.

Chances are you spend a good portion of your day online and look at many different web sites. And probably every single one of those sites are showing you ads-not just one ad but many ads. Ads of different sizes and shapes. Text ads, animated ads-great ads and terrible ads. How often do you click on those ads? Probably not that often.

Did I really just write that? On a blog about online advertising? That you probably don’t click on online ads very often?

Well, it’s probably true. And having that perspective gives you a better lens to analyze the success of your online ad campaign. If you know that the average click thru rate on a site is .1% and your ad gets .2%, then you should feel like your ad was a great success! It means it got twice as many clicks as other ads typically do on that site. Clearly your product or company is resonating with the readers. If your CTR is lower than that, it could mean that the target audience might not be the best fit for your company. Or, it could mean you might want to try out a new ad (I’ll write more on how to handle low CTRs later).

No matter what your CTR is, it helps to have something to compare it to. I think first-time advertisers can find it a little bit strange when I send them a note saying congratulations on their high click through rate and their CTR is .6%. Because that just sounds like a small number. But in the world of online advertising, that is a very big number.

And don’t forget how that might translate. If your ad was seen 7 million times, a .6% CTR works out to 42,000 clicks-now doesn’t that sound like a lot of clicks? That’s because it is!

So whether you advertise with us or on other sites, don’t be afraid to ask questions when you are hearing numbers that sound really big or really small and you aren’t sure how to make sense of it all. The ad team can help put things in context for you so you can go back to going about your important daily business…Cute Overload, here I come!

My name is Leslie and I am the Associate Relationship Manager at Design*Sponge. My main focus for the Design*Sponge ad team is also my favorite part of the job: helping our small business clients, who are often new to the world of online advertising, get up and running. Like Felice, I did not end up at Design*Sponge because of my background in online advertising. In fact, my experience lies in the education and the nonprofit world.

In 2008, I left the Boston area to follow a dream I’d had since I was 11 years old: to move to San Francisco. I picked up and left everything I knew to move to my favorite city in the U.S.

In between job searching, doing freelance work and strapping on my sneakers to explore the great neighborhoods in San Francisco (including visiting many of the shops that have been highlighted on D*S), I found myself with a little bit of extra time on my hands.

During a conversation with my brother Aaron, (a.k.a. “AC”) about Design*Sponge, he happened to mention that there was plenty of work to go around on the ad sales side of things. I am an avid fan of Design*Sponge and I was excited by the idea of working for the site. I loved the idea of learning a new field and doing my share for what seemed to be quickly becoming a family business—so I jumped on board!

Like Felice, I found that as I began to navigate the world of online advertising, it felt like learning a foreign language. As I incorporated words like “impression,” “CPM,” “CPC,” “CPA,” “unique visitors,” “geotargeting” and “creative optimization” into my vocabulary, I realized how easy it would be for potential advertisers to feel intimidated. Remembering what it is like not knowing any of the jargon, I make it a priority to be an approachable translator and to make sure our clients feel comfortable in the world of online advertising. Because believe it or not, it’s really not that hard!

Like the rest of the D*S team, I believe in the work that our small business clients are doing (In fact, one of the draws for me to San Francisco was the opportunity to explore the amazing amount of unique shops run by such talented and creative artists). I want to do everything I can to make advertising their work as simple as possible so they can focus their time on designing amazing things for us all to enjoy.

After more than a year in San Francisco, I now find myself back in the Boston area, closer to the friends and family I love. But I am still enjoying my work for D*S and helping to grow the ad program. It’s a lot easier now having the ad team all in the same time zone! Now the challenge is making sure our family get togethers don’t turn into impromptu D*S business meetings :)

In the weeks ahead, I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you about how to better wrap your head around the world of online advertising. I think you might be surprised to realize how many people have the same questions as you.

If you have any specific beginner questions you’d like me to address in future posts, please do so in the comment section!

:)

To get started with on-line advertising it helps to have a grasp of the lingo. There is a lot of insider vocab that may be thrown around willy-nilly but the first tip I am here to share is: ASK! You are definitely not the first person to question what a certain term might mean. Your ad sales team is prepared to help you. Even if you think you know what something might mean but aren’t 100% sure—ASK! It is okay and we would much rather you understand all of the intricacies before you get started.

I am going to give you a few of the basic terms to get started:

ABOVE THE FOLD: the highest placements on the page that can be seen without scrolling down the website.

CAMPAIGN: your ad sales strategy in order to bring more business to your company.

CLICK: when a viewer on a site clicks on your ad and is brought to your site (different from an impression or pageview when a viewer just views the ad and does not click on it).

CPM: Cost Per 1,000 pageviews. Ads are often sold in this way and often means that they will not appear on the page all of the time (unlike a flat-rate ad).

CREATIVE: your ad image.

CTR: Click Through Rate. During your campaign we can determine your CTR by dividing how many clicks your ad has received by how many pageviews you purchased. This number can give you an idea about how well your campaign/ad is doing and how the viewers are responding.

IMPRESSION: Each time the site is viewed on someone’s computer, the site is re-loaded or a different page of the site is viewed.

PAGEVIEW: For our purposes, this is the same as an impression.  (However, it is possible to have a pageview without an impression – if there is no ad on the page.)

VISIT: Each time a viewer looks at the site (different than a pageview because a viewer could look at multiple pages on the same site and it would be one visit but multiple pageviews).

I hope this helps you to get started and begins to decode a small part of online advertising for you!

My name is Felice Cleveland, and I’m the Relationship Manager for the Design*Sponge Ad Sales Team.  It’s my job to make sure that our advertisers are taken care of when they do business with us. I answer questions, monitor campaign performance, and generally just do my best to make sure that everything for our advertisers is going smoothly.

In this post, I’d like to share a little peek into the sometimes mysterious and overwhelming world of online advertising. But first, I want to let you know that just a couple of years ago, I was the perfect example of an online advertising rookie.

Let me explain.

By day, I am a museum educator, a returned Peace Corps volunteer and an avid letter writer.

I am adept in the fine arts of pompoms, shrinky dinks, and exquisite corpses. All of which I love to share with students.

I train docents in the obscure knowledge behind visionary art.

I have degrees in Contemporary Art History and Art + Design Education.

I don’t have a blog.

I’m not on Facebook.

I am the exact opposite of anyone who you would imagine would work in Online Advertising.

Design*Sponge and I had crossed paths a few times before I entered into their employ. I was (and still am) a fan of how they support small business.

I was one month away from getting my Masters degree, and in search of a secondary part-time job to help pay for school loans, when happenstance led me to find an open position on the Ad Sales team of Design*Sponge.

Intrigued, I met with Aaron (also known to Design*Sponge readers as “AC,” who runs the Design*Sponge Advertising program) only to confess, “I know nothing about Ad Sales and I am not very confident in my technological knowledge.”

He must have recognized that I appreciate a challenge and love learning because they welcomed me on board. He was also insistent that anyone could quickly learn the basics, and that’s where I began.

In fact, Aaron liked my background and day job, and said that he’d prefer someone for the job who could relate more to our advertisers than to someone who worked in ad sales. Who knew that a total lack of experience could qualify someone for a job?

Aaron has done a lot of hand holding over the years, but I am a prime example that the hardest student can be taught. Now, from working early mornings, nights, weekends, and lunch breaks, I’ve become a “Relationship Manager” for the Design*Sponge Ad Team!

On-line advertising can be intimidating. It can feel like a foreign language. You may have questions you don’t know how to articulate. You may not even know where to start. It is okay. This is normal.

I’m here to tell you that you can do it. Let me hold your hand for a bit as I pass along a few big concepts to get comfortable with before you even start advertising:

1. Think about what you (really) want to get out of your advertising campaign. I will talk about this more in detail in weeks to come. But just think about, ponder, meditate. No one can help you if you are unsure about what you want and where your business is headed.
2. It costs money to make money. I know this may seem counterintuitive, but advertising done in the right way will eventually begin to pay for itself. You have to start somewhere. Advertising is an investment in your business.
3. Research. Ask for ad rate kits, find out information, and find the right fit for you.
4. Start paying attention to the ads on any sites that you frequent. This will be helpful to start noticing what types of ads are interesting for you and that you would click on. Also, are you seeing the same ads all the time or different ads? Start noticing. Awareness is the first step.

In the weeks to come I will walk you through some basics and share with you some of my experiences and lessons along the way. I’m looking forward to it!

Just remember, if I can do it, you can DEFINITELY do it.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my background is in buying advertising and managing campaigns, not in selling advertising. And one of the things I’ve noticed as I’ve been managing the Desing*Sponge ad program for the past few years is that there tends to be a major knowledge gap between professional media buyers and the average small business owner buying ads to promote own business.
The good news is that the information you need to bridge the gap is out there, and one of the purposes of this blog is to help share that information.

In this series, “Before You Get Started” we’ll discuss things to know and/or think about before you get started in Online Advertising.

Today’s topic is Traffic Sources.

THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR CURRENT TRAFFIC:

1. how much traffic you’re getting

We’ll talk more about setting campaign goals in a future post, but an extremely common goal for online advertising is generating traffic to a website. For today’s article, we’ll assume that’s the reason we’re considering advertising online in the first place.

It stands to reason that before you start spending money to generate more traffic to your website, you should know how much traffi you’re already getting. The first thing to do is to make sure you have Google Analytics installed. It’s easy to install and it’s free, and it’s the most accurate gauge of your site’s traffic. It’s also incredibly powerful, and can give you just about any data that you’d need.

For now, the only data you need is how many “visits” you’re getting per month.  [I'm not going to focus on "unique visits" for the moment, because when we measure advertising, we'll be mostly looking at how many "clicks" your campaign got, and there's really no metric called "unique clicks" - a click is a click. So for our purposes, we'll be equating a "click" to a "visit".  If you have any questions about these terms, feel free to post them in the comments and I'll address them there.]

If you know how many visits you get on average, per day, then we can start trying to figure out how many more visits you need to start meeting your business goals. The way we do this, is by learning thing #2…

2. how much your traffic is worth

Let’s assume for the moment that you run an e-commerce site.  You look at your Google Analytics and see that you get 25,000 visits per month.  Then you look at your PayPal account (or whoever you use for your merchant account) and you see that you make, on average, about $5,000 in revenue per month. That means we can estimate that each visit to your site is worth approximately $0.20.

That’s valuable information! Now you know that if you can bring in similar quality traffic (more on that in a moment) for less than $0.20 per visit (or “click”) your ad campaign will be profitable.  You’ve now got some good benchmarks (or numbers you can use for comparison) for your next campaign.

If your cost per click stays below $0.20, and the quality of the traffic you buy is consistent with your current quality, you should buy as much traffic at whatever price you can get at that price.  Why? Because every click you buy makes you money.

A couple of points about this:

• the quality of the traffic you buy may not be the same as what you’re currently getting, it may be better or it may be worse, but even if it’s worse, it can still be profitable if you can get it at the right price.
• depending on where you choose to advertise, you may not be buying the media on a cost-per-click basis.  You may pay by the day, week, or month, or you may pay by the impression (or each time the ad is shown), or some other arrangement.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t calculate the cost of each click you get from your campaign (especially if you have Google Analytics installed – because you’ll be able to see all the clicks that came in from your campaign).

Once you know how much traffic you’re getting, and how much it’s worth, there’s only one piece left to know…

3. where your traffic is coming from

Google Analytics "Traffic Sources" Report

If you’re happy with the value of the current traffic you’re getting, the next logical step is to try to get more traffic from similar sources.

For example, if the majority of your traffic is from incoming links from blogs, you should consider contacting those blogs and see if they accept advertising (they probably do). Or, if most of your traffic comes from keyword searches on products you sell (such as “ceramic bowls”, “letterpress cards”, etc.), now you’re likely going to want to look at advertising on search engines (to have your ad appear when people are searching on those or similar keywords).  I’ll write more about how to do that in a later post, but it’s something to start thinking about now.

Obviously, there are all types of other traffic sources that you may find when you’re looking through your traffic data.  These are just examples.

The point is, before you start spending money, take a look at where you’re already making money.  It’s going to give you some good guidelines for how and where you can make more.

Here’s what to do next:

Thanks and we’ll talk to you soon!

Aaron

I want to welcome you to the Building A Better Advertiser blog.  We set it up so that we could share information that would make the world of online advertising a little less scary for beginners.  If you’re already experienced, we’ll also be sharing information that will allow you to take your advertising efforts to the next level.

I’ve been working in online advertising for the past five years.  I started out doing what is called Search Marketing (also known as Pay-Per-Click or PPC), and I worked at a digital marketing agency managing large scale campaigns (thousands of keywords and hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend).

After a few years, I began managing Display campaigns (also known as banner ads, or the type of non-text ads you see on websites throughout the internet) for clients.  I was amazed to learn how much technology and methodology goes into running a professional advertising campaign.

My involvement with Design*Sponge’s Advertising began in 2007, and it started as something of a side project for me.  As the site’s traffic grew, Grace began to get more and more requests for information about advertising, and it was distracting her from what she loves, which is creating content for Design*Sponge.

I had no experience in Advertising Sales.

All of my expereince was in buying ads and managing campaigns, so I knew what professional media buyers cared about.  So I tried to set up the whole program with that in mind.  I didn’t want our customers to have to deal with “Ad Sales” people, because almost no one likes dealing with Ad Sales people. ;)

So here’s where things got amusing, I was an ad BUYER with no experience SELLING ads, acting as a SELLER to customers were mostly artists and small business owners with no experience BUYING ads.

As I got to know our customers, the vast difference in knowledge between my peers at the office (my day job at the time), who spent all day buying ads and managing campaigns, and our customers for Design*Sponge, many of whom were buying their very first ad, became apparent.  I talked to Grace about this issue, she thought it would be useful for me to write a Biz Ladies post about the basics of online advertising.

The response to that post was so amazing, that I’ve wanted to write more ever since.  And since we didn’t want to turn the “Biz Ladies” section of Design*Sponge into a regular column that was just about Online Advertising, we decided to start this blog.

Our goal is to teach you some of the techniques and methods used by advertising professionals, and to de-mystify some of the more confusing or intimidating aspects of the advertising process.  We’ll try to make it painless and fun.

In future posts, you’ll meet the rest of the D*S Ad Team, and we’ll try to answer all of your questions about Online Advertising.

So welcome, and please let me know in the comments section if there’s anything specific that you’d like me to cover in future posts.

Thanks, and I’m looking forward to writing more!