Online Advertising On the Cheap

By Laura Quinn, September 29, 2010

 Online advertising is more affordable than it might sound. With Google Ads, you can reach out to the people searching on a particular keyword.  Facebook ads can be targeted it to the exact demographic you're interested in, based on age, sex, geographic location, education, or even your own Facebook audience.  Blog ads are also reasonably affordable and inexpensive.  On a budget of a couple hundred dollars, you could probably reach a number of people that weren't previously familiar with your organization.

Online advertising lets you advertise your organization or mission through other people’s websites. Some sites limit you to text ads, while others let you run banner ads—usually an image limited to a particular size, though animation and interactive banner ads are sometimes possible. You typically pay for ads by “impression”—the number of times the ad shows on a site—or by “click”—the number of times any user clicks on the ad.
 
Google AdWords are a common, cost-effective method. You create a short text ad and choose the keywords and geographic area you’d like to reach, and Google posts your ad next to searches for them. Google provides easy-to-use tools to track your results and further optimize campaigns, making it straightforward to manage. Cost depends on the popularity of the keywords you choose, but often starts at just a few cents for each user who clicks through to your site—and you can cap the amount you spend per day. Even better, qualifying nonprofits can get up to $10,000 per month  in free Google AdWords advertising through the Google Grants program.
 
Facebook also supports online ads similar to Google’s, for somewhat less expense. Advertisers have the option to create either text- or image-based ads, and pay either per-click or per-impression. Easy to use tools allow you to target a very specific demographics, and pay likely somewhere between $0.50 and $1.50 for each person who clicks your ad. Facebook charges a $1 per day minimum in the U.S.
 
Both Google and Facebook offer tools that let you monitor your ad's performance in a lot of specific detail, including how much you've spent, and how many people have clicked.  Facebook also reports on the demographics of the people who have clicked your ad -- a very interesting point of data.
 
Many Blogs and websites also accept ads, a good way to target a particular niche audience. Companies like Blogads facilitate advertising across a number of different sites. These networks typically let you search for Blogs and websites by demographic, audience size and prices. Prices vary depending on the blog, placement and duration, but start as low as $15 per site for a week-long ad on a less-known site. 

 

 

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Comments

What offers the better ROI?

by Hatef Yamini (not verified) - 2010-10-13 14:41

Laura, your post is accurate and well-written, thank you!

 The information you provided is especially useful to nonprofits with a campaign goal that's focused on impressions. But more often than not, nonprofits want to build their house list too. In that case, I would suggest your readers take a step back and ask a more basic question, namely: "What has the better return on investment (ROI), traditional advertising or paid acquisition? While I'm now an independent nonprofit consultant, I used to work at Care2 where I learned a lot about online advertising and based on my experience working with hundreds of nonprofits, I think paid acquisition is a better way to go. One problem is that providers of cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM) blog ads such as you describe in your post will gladly take a nonprofit's money, but won't guarantee that the nonprofit will receive ANY lasting benefits for their organization. The second and more significant problem is that the nonprofit has to bear all the risks and responsibilities of the campaign. They have to design it, monitor it, update it frequently, craft the language and develop a landing page (a step rarely often skipped). And of course, they have to master the art of persuading a set of Facebook eyeballs, or Google "clickers," to take the all-important extra step of signing up for the nonprofit's email list, with clear and strong permission, so that the nonprofit will have an ongoing way to communicate with them and eventually convert them into a donor, volunteer or supporter. The truth is many nonprofits simply don't have the resources or skill to pull off a CPC campaign on their own. I've even worked with nonprofits that had very generous Google grants that still couldn't turn those impressions into supporters. And if you calculate how much time they invested in managing the ads, you'll find they experienced a negative ROI.  Frankly, managing and crafting CPC ads with a positive ROI is a lot harder than it looks. By contrast, paid acquisition with a provider like Care2 eliminates the risk found with CPC ads -- and without the steep learning curves of traditional online ads and search engine campaigns.  List growth campaigns, in which a nonprofit organization contracts with a provider such as Care2, which already has a large recruitment pool of online "do gooders" reach an already willing audience. The provider does ALL the work for the nonprofit client to recruit pre-qualified folks, using a pemission-based marketing approach, in which they first ask their members to take a pre-qualifying online action of some sort (such as signing a nonprofit-sponsored pledge or petition). Then, if they do this, to take the extra step of signing up for the email list of the organization that sponsored the previous action.  In this way, the nonprofit is guaranteed to receive a recruit, quickly, and with a working addresses. In some cases the nonprofit can even receive a street addresses (good for those nonprofits that also engage in direct mail fundraising). Best of all, the nonprofit does not have to pay for branding, impressions or clicks (those things are all part of the experience, but at no cost) and only pays a fee for each person who voluntarily signs up. This results-based cost per signup -- sometimes called cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or cost-per-lead (CPL) -- typically starts at about $2.00 based on my research across multiple providers. Of course, the cost goes down for larger campaigns. To sum up:  Buying Google ads or Facebook ads may not be a complete waste of time, especially for those nonprofits that have an impressions focused campaign, or higher risk tolerance, big budgets, and skilled employees to learn the tricky craft of landing page conversions. But most nonprofits who test alternatives will find that they can achieve their list growth goals faster, more simply and at lower risk by doing paid acquisition campaigns with a trusted provider of these services. The best part is that if the nonprofit does a good job of building a relationship with the new list members, then over time, they can achieve a positive ROI by tracking donations. Hatef Yaminihatef@simpliconsulting.com