Google offers $1,000 credits for newspaper print ads

Google is offering AdWords publishers credits of up to $1,000 for trying out Google Print Ads, a new extension of Google AdWords that appear in U.S. newspapers.

In AdWords accounts, Google has added a "Print Ads" tab where publishers can choose from over 200 daily newspapers, ranging from small local papers to nationwide papers. Advertisers set their own price, upload their ads, and manage multiple campaigns in one interface.

Google makes about 95 percent of its earnings from Internet ads, but has been quietly testing the waters with print ads for two years.

The credits were offered in e-mails sent July 19 to existing AdWords accounts. If advertisers publish a newspaper ad by August 31, they receive a credit of $500. If the advertiser uses a participating ad creation specialist, they receive a $1,000 credit.

Here's a demo of Google Print Ads.

All credits will be applied to Google Print Ads account within 30 days of the end of the promotion on August 31, 2007. Since advertisers will receive the promotional credit after they've been charged for the newspaper ads, the $500 or $1,000 credit will be applied toward future costs.
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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

Q&A: How effective is Amazon's ClickRiver for marketing books?

QUESTION: What's your take on ClickRiver, Amazon's new pay-per-click advertising network? Will this be a viable method for advertising books?

ANSWER: I opened a ClickRiver beta account a couple of weeks ago and have been diddling with it. First, the good news:

• It's much easier to use than Google Adwords. The interface is clean and it reponds fast. If you ask for a keyword, you'll start getting impressions within a few minutes. It's also relatively cheap -- you can buy impressions on practically any keyword(s) for 10 cents per click. But that's probably because not many people are competing for the keywords, at least not yet.

• ClickRiver does a great job of suggesting additional keywords. For example, let's imagine you're advertising a book on "orchids." Once ClickRiver knows you're targeting orchids, it will suggest every book title and author name in the orchid space -- at least those that have good sales. It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many good keywords will be suggested that you didn't think of. One thing I found odd, though: ClickRiver didn't suggest any titles newer than two years. I guess this is a glitch.

The bad news:

• Clickthroughs are very, very sparse. I have thousands of impressions so far, and not one single click. If this was an Adword ad, Google would have shut it off already for low clickthrough. So on the one hand, ClickRiver hasn't cost me a cent, but on the other hand it's been a complete waste of time.
  

I'm sure the reason for the low clickthrough is that ClickRiver ads just aren't that visible on Amazon's detail pages. For example, here are some ClickRiver ads that appear on the detail page for a Garfield book, they appear far down the page and are uncompelling by design:


Visibility will probably always be a tension for this program -- For Amazon to make serious money with this, they're going to have to raise the profile of the ads. But the more they do this, the more likely buyers will be distracted from buying the Amazon product they're looking at.

I've always suspected that pay-per-click is an ineffective way to market consumer books. There's simply not enough profit margin in the typical book to pay $10, $15 or more in advertising for each sale. PPC is supposedly a revolutionary way of targeting people, but I believe it gets the same crummy response as most direct mail 2 percent to 5 percent.

It's a different story if you have a high-margin book or a club or service where acquiring a customer is worth hundreds of dollars over the lifetime of the customer. But I think the main user of ClickRiver ads will turn out to be people who are selling high-priced, high-margin products and services outside Amazon.

Marketing self-published books on the Web

There's a saying that book advertising doesn't work. Another way of saying it is that money spent on advertising books is wasted money. Why? The theory is that a consumer's decision to buy a book is such a personal one, that advertising can't influence this behavior. Word-of-mouth (free advertising) is the only kind of advertising that moves books, or so the theory goes.

What about Internet advertising? If you have a Web site with traffic, through a blog audience or valuable content, you have a built-in free advertising machine for showcasing your book.

If you don't have the Web traffic already, pay-per-click advertising programs such as Google Adwords could provide a way to build awareness for your book. But generally, even this advertising doesn't work well for selling books.

The problem is that clicks for the keywords to drive traffic to your book's Web page may cost around $1 apiece. Let's assume your profit margin on the book is $5, and you're willing to give up that whole margin to kick-start your sales. You'll need one of every five clickers -- a conversion rate of 20 percent -- to buy your book to break even. Not very likely.

I tried marketing my book initially through Adwords keywords. I used every word and phrase in my book's index, but didn't notice any sales from that, despite spending a couple thousand dollars (ouch!). I tried limiting my ads to Google's search network (no content network ads) and that didn't help either.

However, recently Google allowed you to specify which sites on its content network your ad will run. So I've had much better results by limiting my ads to the very few sites dedicated to my book's topic that show Google content ads. They call it a "site targeted" campaign. It probably hasn't been cost-effective for me in itself, but I believe it has sparked some word-of-mouth to get sales going.

Also, a couple weeks after the book was available, I sent review copies of the book to some of the "top reviewers" on Amazon, about the top 75 who review nonfiction books. I've gotten about 25 positive reviews from that effort, and I noticed that sales picked up noticeably after the positive reviews began appearing.