Ad Targeting By Day is Useful Tactic for Online Clients

Ad targeting by day is a well-known and traditional way of advertising in a newspaper. It also is a useful tactic for selling online.

In the traditional way, an advertiser buys an ad position in a certain section of the paper on one particular day of the week. The concept is obvious because daily newspapers publish once a day and weeklies publish once a week.

Advertisers can place ads multiple days. But they may place an ad only on one day because of budget limitations or an event that makes one day special, such as a sale or entertainment event.

It turns out the concept works quite well online. Online advertisers of course can run a targeted advertising campaign in multiple ways over multiple days. They also can target by time, geography and in some cases by demographics.

But running a campaign on only one day and for the entire day is different than the popular ways of running a banner campaign online. With a typical banner campaign, the client buys X number of impressions to appear in a section on the site or run of site (ROS) over a period of time.

The time period is usually weeks if not months. The online ad-serving software displays the ads smoothly over time so that 100,000 impressions, for example, will appear about 1,000 times a day over 100 days. The client usually pays on a cost-per-thousand impression basis. It may limit the number of impressions that each website visitor sees.

Why Advertisers Might Do Ad Targeting by Day

Some newspapers are successfully using the print model as a sales tactic for their websites. They go to an advertiser and say, “For $1,000, your ad will appear all day long Friday on just the home page.”

The number of impressions for both the home page and the ad on Friday doesn’t matter. What matters is that the advertiser dominates a page on the site (or multiple pages, such as run of site) for just that day. This is a sponsorship advertising model instead of the more popular CPM or CPC models.

Some of the opportunities are obvious. They include events, sales and other dated, short-term opportunities. Imagine an important event that is falling behind on ticket sales and is in need of a last-minute boost. One newspaper reported great results for a local semi-pro hockey team that sponsored the sports index page of its site. The team sold so many tickets because of the campaign that it came back repeatedly to promote future games.

Another benefit to this approach is that print account executives who need to deliver some online sales results grasp it easily because it has something in common with print. As a result, they will find it easier to sell than other online products. Likewise, advertisers who are used to buying print but not online will grasp it more quickly as well.