looking for Space InAll theRight Places_.: ilChalways wanted to be somebody, but I should have been morespecific.”Lily TomlinWhat do you look for when you place TV commercials?The right audience. If you’re selling beer, it’s unlikely thatyou’re going to find a decent demographic audience onMasterpiece Theatre. If you’re selling Grey Poupon, itwouldn’t be wise to spend a lot of money for ads on Demo-lition Derby.What do you look for when you place ads in magazines?The right audience. Fishing tackle probably won’t movewell in Architectural Digest.Newspapers? First, you choose the geography, then youpick the section, then you pick the right days. You’re afterthe right audience. Why should it be any different on theWorld Wide Web?You’re taking the time and going to the trouble of gettingoriented (hey, you’re taking the time to read this, right?).You’re going to do your best to create captivating ads.And, while you’re not spending a million dollars for thirtyseconds of the Superbowl, you are committing some ofyour hard-fought budget on this electronic experiment. Itwould be a shame if all that time, effort, and money werespent to put your message in front of people who won’t get194)Chapter 6Looking for Space In All the Right Placesit, won’t like it, and-most important of all-won’t buy it. You’ll be wasting your budget. You’llbe wasting your time. Your boss won’t be very happy, either.The trick to banner placement on the Web is part context, part unconventional thinking, partcompetitive penetration, and a healthy dose of technology. The Web comes complete with newways and new means of reaching would-be buyers. There are new tactics. There are also sometried and true techniques that will come as no surprise to anyone. It’s the combination that canmake your Web advertising campaign pay off.Join the CrowdUnless you’re trying to sell something to everybody and your name is Honda, Coke, or Nike,one of the first things you should do is buy banners on sites that attract your kind of people. Ifyour name is Honda, Coke, or Nike, you already know that Netscape has enough daily visitorsto earn big bucks selling ad space. You may want to avail yourself of their venue. If a couplemillion people drive the same freeway day after day, it makes sense to put up a billboard. If acouple of million people end up at the Netscape site every day, it makes sense to put up abanner.There’s No Escape from NetscapeOne of the single most visited sites on the Internet is Netscape. It gets visited because that’swhere you are taken when you fire up your Netscape browser. Even if you were nerdly enoughto change the Netscape browser options so your home page is now some other Net destination(Options, General Preferences), Netscape still hooks the masses with its directory buttons. Atthe top of the browser window, just above the site being visited and just below the Location boxshowing the current URL, are the Directory buttons:1. What’s New?2. What’s Cool?3. Destinations4. Net Search5. People6. SoftwareThose buttons are in your face and hard to ignore. Microsoft Explorer may have a Searchbutton and a Favorites list of built-in bookmarks, but the Netscape mystique is still working intheir favor for now.Netscape earned $53 million in 1997 putting Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo! on their NetSearch page. They’ll earn more and more as the major brand names decide they want to bewhere all the people are. You can pay big bucks to put your logo in lights at Times Square,Picadilly Circus, or on the road into town from the Hong Kong airport. Netscape isn’t muchdifferent. It’s for great awareness and recognition-branding.Join the Crowd 1 195How many millions of people visit Netscape every day? Lots. According to the claim on theNetscape Web site, it is “the most often visited site on the Web according to Netscape’s latestI/Pro Audit.” It’s certainly a number that grows day-by-day.What kind of people visit the Netscape site? In April of 1996, Netscapians got Griggs-AndersonResearch to conduct a survey of almost 20,000 Netscape Navigator users. Their results giveyou a snapshot:68% have a household income more than $50,000.48% are between 26 and 45 years old.84% are male.57% have completed four years or more of college.18% are in the computer industry.77% are employed full-time.22% are students (half of them are employed).12% work from their homes.39% have used their credit card number to make a Web purchase.If you’re thinking that this is just the type of person you’re trying to reach, you’re not veryparticular. You’re not thinking in the broad sense of a brand maker or the narrow sense of anInternet direct marketer. These are averages. This is the result of a general sifting throughNetscape server statistics. If you’re selling fishing tackle, you need to tie your flies a littletighter. If you’re Visa, maybe it makes sense to tackle the world from this direction.Visa is going atter people who eat out. At least, people who are interested in wandering theWeb to read about eating out. They spent most of 1997 and into 1998 pushing a “Cities To DineFor” campaign on Epicurious Food and Travel (www.epicurious.com). Restaurant reviews forcities like London, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, and Tokyo will be festooned with encour-agement to use your Visa card when the bill comes. Visa is also sponsoring GeoCities’NapaValley (www.geocities.com/NapaValley) (see Figure 6.1), which zeros in on gourmetfood and wine. If you eat and can afford a credit card, Visa figures that’s good enough for them.This kind of thinking belongs to those who deal in broad brush strokes and aggregate informa-tion. You should only be looking at the big pull sites like Netscape or the search engines if yourgoal is global domination and your name is Microsoft. The numbers from LinkExchange(www.linkexchange.com) suggest that the more focused the site, the higher theclickthrough.Ali Partovi, founder of LinkExchange, rattles off the numbers by heart. ‘The sites we looked atcame up with pretty consistent results. If you show over a million impressions per day, theclickthrough is about two percent. Ten thousand to a hundred thousand impressions a dayyields about two and a half percent. One thousand to ten thousand a day gets about two andtwo-thirds clicks and the site with less than a thousand impressions a day continually gets overthree percent impressions to clicks. It’s