Offline Advertising To Boost Online Traffic – Does it work?

I had an interesting chat with Mr.Green couple days ago and somehow we ended up talking about offline ads (radio/TV/Newspaper …) and how much they can actually influence the traffic of online projects. Since I managed the ad campaigns for 2 large online projects not so long ago, I have some experience with this, so let me share it with you.

BASIC SUMMARY

In both cases I had a pretty large budget and it was up to me to decide what I would to do with it. One of the project was a real estate portal, the other one was a country wide distributor of “bedroom stuff” – mattresses, beds … The goal of the real estate portal was to raise traffic levels and also get the attention of realtors, who would be willing to put their portfolio on the portal. The “bedroom stuff” distributor wanted to start an e-shop and promote their “brick&mortar” business at the same time. They had 12 branches open across the country when I launched the campaigns, and opened 10 more during the process.

PROJECT no.1 : REAL ESTATE PROJECT

Let’s start with the real estate portal : obviously, the first thing I did was to launch google adwords campaigns, facebook posts boosts, local ad networks etc .. this is all online advertising that is not interesting in this context. Once all of this was running, I started to look around to get some offline ads going.

1.A Local Newspaper : The first thing I did was order a few ads in locally distributed advertising newspapers with real estate sections – you know that kind that is dropped into people mail boxes for free. I picked 3 publications, all of them based in a large city – one in western part of the country, one in the south and one in the east – in order to cover the whole country more or less. Each of them was published once a week in the following amounts: 65 000 copies (west), almost 50 000 copies (south) and 45 000 copies for the last one (east).

The format I picked was page-wide strip at the top of the page, cca 5 cm in height – black&white + red domain name. The text (angle) used the “local” approach, so something like : “1000’s of properties in “YourCity” region”. These were pretty cheap and I got almost 50% discount for longer orders, so I ordered 3-6 months of distribution straight away. Once they started to rotate, we could see a small increase in traffic, but considering the investment … this was a failure. The traffic increase was really small, 100+ visits per day.

1.B Magazines : Next thing I did, was ...