Garland Pollard's  Instablog

It was a four-page 80-pound-paper stock mailing, printed just for me, in a crisp envelope, entitled Adwords Newsletter. It was to tell me about my recent ad campaign with Google. A report worthy of the old Price Waterhouse, it was as useful an explanation of Google advertising as could be devised in four pages. Typographically, it was very good.

Mind you, I had spent a less than $10 with Google. I had been hooked by a $50 Google trial offer that had been part of a promotional package sent out to users of Hostgator, my web hosting company.

The page had a summary of the Google advertising I had done, and a repeat of the most effective ad.

The custom report also had keywords that worked to lure my 11 clicks, total impressions (over 70,000) and a 0.03% click-through-rate. On the back, it had explanations of how to figure ROI. I compare it to newspapers, who often just expect small retail merchants to understand lingo like CPM. The lead sentence was:

You probably already review the number of clicks and impressions your ads receive, but are you tracking your ROI too?

I write of this not to tell you whether I think the results are good, or bad. They are neither. They just are, and they help me look at marketing.

The reason I mention it is that in my years working for newspapers or magazines, they NEVER sent out anything as useful as this Adwords Newsletter after the sale. In most cases when you advertise with print, what you get as an advertiser is a big fat bill. If you spend alot, one might get a golf outing with the publisher. With magazines, sometimes the bill even arrives BEFORE the actual magazine. Of course if you spend lots, you might get some audited circulation numbers, but often these are not customized to your ad schedule.

But I, as an advertiser, had spent less that $10, and I got the sort of attention lavished on a premium customer. I have to say, I was impressed. But my other thought was to be a bit embarrassed that print doesn’t do a better job of reporting its advertising results to customers in customized ways. Now perhaps I am missing something; maybe some publishers are doing it but obviously not enough.

What if I got exact tracking information for how my classified was displayed across the Internet? What if newspapers told me how many copies they sold the day that the ad ran?

In the old days, when daily newspapers were a monopoly, you ran a classified ad in the Sunday paper, and the phone rang off the hook. You didn’t have to have this sort of reporting. But now, you do, and newspapers and magazines better figure out some sort of sophisticated automated reporting system that can give small advertisers something this good.

I ran a second series of ads for another web client with Google the same week. We spent less than $10 for a few clicks and about 60,000 impressions.  Her phone rang off the hook, quite different than the last time she advertised in the newspaper, when nothing happened, and she got that big bill.

For me, a lover of newspapers, it’s a sobering reality. But I say this not to point fingers but to instead urge them to do better.

As a person who publishes a website with Adwords, it’s a bit disappointing to know some folks get lots of exposure on your site but you only get paid if someone clicks. There are folks trying to deal with the issue, with new formats, including David Payne of Short Tail Media. But it’s a wake up call to daily newspapers, where you can hardly buy a classified for $10 bucks.