October 20, 2021

Case Study: How Two Newspapers Turned Not Performing Landing Pages into a Profitable Advertising Channel

Ad Gallery

We will address three major challenges in successful local display advertising that need to be overcome to scale advertising in the long tail with SME customers.

Christian Scherbel

Founder

Lately we came across the same 3 big challenges of successful local display advertising that we have to get out of the way to make local advertising in long tail and with SME customers scale:

1) Price & Quality of existing banners: Quality remains a significant issue for advertisers as a lot of local advertisers just don’t have a good agency or internal design teams and then use the sales rep to design banners together which results in a lot of feedback loops and often sub-optimal banner. See a few examples for yourself in the vieo.

2) Landing Pages: It start with them not being optimised for mobile devices but continues with the fact that most of the landing pages are simple “business cards” of the local advertiser: no call-to-actions, no current offering but just general “about us” texts.

3) Overwhelming complexity: Advertisers can choose from 100s of formats, positioning and more and get confronted with buzzwords like targeting, remarketing, CPM, CPC, frequency capping, programmatic and much more. This is so complex that often just doing nothing at all seems to be the only option to ge for – for the local advertiser but also the local sales rep.

In order to scale local advertising we have to overcome all three challenges.

What we learned from 200+ publisher projects from local longtail display ads.

What works?

Take what you already have: We for example, start from the blank print of the advertising, extracting all possible data from the print ad and enrich that with everything we find about the advertiser from the web: homepage, social media, video platforms, yellow pages, etc.
Create a mobile-first banner with a carousel out of this data.
The third step is to create a performing landing page as an overlay for each advertiser, including easy and intuitive call to action buttons (call, email, navigate through Google maps integration).
Offer one simple offering for the advertiser at one price (regional ad impressions+banner+landing page) that can be bundled into existing offers as low as 99€ per campaign.
Last but not least: report intuitive KPIs. Talk about attention time on the landingpage, contact requests instead of CTRs, CPMs, etc. … and make that visual like the dashboards Smartico build.