The phrase "There's a sucker born every minute, and two to take 'em" is often attributed to P.T. Barnum but it appears that it actually came from a con-man named Joseph Bessimer, a rival of P.T. Barnum. If Joseph was alive today, he would have to be selling Internet advertising. I am in this Internet advertising business and I see these con-artist regularly. It is hard to avoid them. It isn't difficult to figure out why these folks exist, there is some kind of mystique about the Internet that makes Internet advertising seem different from all other advertising. It promises the world, and yet burns so many folks looking for legitimate ways of promoting their business. This type of advertising is basically no different from any other form of advertising if you have the simple skills to separate the Internet advertising wheat from the chaff.

Advertising works best when you know your customers well and are able to target those customers effectively. For instances, if I sell my product to a specific group of people, say women, it doesn't make a lot of sense to advertise my product where the primary group that will see it are men...or children. It is necessary for me to know my customer demographics. I generally recommend that a customer starts by creating a customer profile. These demographics would include gender, age, estimated income, ethnicity and education to start. You are looking at broad categories at first so as an example, if I would have a store I'd look at the folks entering and log them in broad categories. Age could be young or old, male or female, etc.  I would also include specific traits that my customers have that draws them to my product or service. One major hamburger chain noticed that kids drove their market and adjusted their marketing to take advantage of this fact (and other followed). If my typical customer is within a geographic region, I'd include that information as well. The more you know about your customer, the better you are able to target that specific group with your advertising. In a perfect world, you would want to only advertise to those folks that are thinking or ready to purchase your product. This isn't a perfect world (no matter what the con-men say) so it is best to target a group that is likely to be interested in your product or service at some point in the future. When they are ready to make the purchase, you want them to find you as easily as possible to complete the transaction.

Now that you have this basic demographic information, you want to begin the task of targeting those potential customers as effectively as possible. I can assure you that there are plently of websites that want your advertising dollars and many are willing to lie to you to get your money. Any Internet advertising campaign is only effective if I can reach a large number of potential customers at the lowest possible price. This is what is generally refered to as a high return on investment (ROI). Many of the con-artist websites will inflate their visitor numbers to make it seem that they reach tens of thousands (or millions) of people, so you will want to look at the website demographics from a third party source to compare one website with another. You will often find that what you are told by the marketing rep of the website and what is audited by a third party marketing firm are different by a wide margin. Sometimes this is due to the methology used to calculate the number of visitors. I like to start by measuring everyone the same way so I can compare two different websites as easily as possible. I always consider third party information as more unbiased.  This provides a quick way to at least start to whittle down the advertising options.

Most folks are aware that television marketing folks use Nielsen Reports to measure how many people watch a specific TV program. Radio has a similar service called Amitron . Newspapers use Audit Bureau of Ciculations (ABC) but the Internet has three services that can provide this type of public marketing information. These are Alexa.com , Compete.com and Quantcast.com . Out of these three, I find I use Quantcast because they provide a service that is slightly different from the other two, in that they also include a method of direct website measurement that I personally feel is more accurate and I like the way they display the demographics. Show me a website that uses this method, and I feel much more confortable considering them. This is a personal preference, but in reality I do use all three services when I evaluate a website's advertising potential.

Always ask a potential website you are considering to advertise upon to provide you demographics of their visitors. You will also want two additional bits of information, their total visitors each month and their unique visitors. If they quote "hits" I tend to be insistant wanting total visitors and unique visitors. I prefer to have this in writting, so email works for me. With this information, I begin my research. I go to Quantcast.com and enter the URL of the home page of the site I am considering purchasing advertisement. Quantcast should return a page of information about the website. If I don't find demographic information about the site there, I go no further. Their traffic level is below the level I feel confortable using. Believe me, this will cut quite a few possible sites from your list of potentials. If it does provide demographic information about the site, I print the first page and move on to the next site I want to consider for advertising.

Quantcast does not appear to return demographics for a site with less than 2000 unique visitors a month. There are many of those websites out there and if someone tells me they get a high number of uniques and Quantcast indicates that is not true, that is enough for me to go elsewhere. Unless they offer free advertising, I wouldn't even consider listing there. I do set a minimum unique visitors each month at 10,000 just to get the coverage I generally require, but this is an arbitrary limit I feel confortable using.  I take the total number of visitors the website provided me and divide it with the unique number that Quantcast gives me and this is a ratio providing me with the number of times the average user returns to the webite each month. I'm looking for this number to be greater than 1.25 for it to remain on my consideration list. I also use Quantcast's "Share of Visits" graph at the bottom to provide a quick reference if I do not have the website metrics.

Part 2: Putting the Marketing Pieces Together

Part 3: Measuring the Results 

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