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Online Journalism News

Getting offline advertisers online

Posted: 20/02/07 By: Oliver Luft
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The bells and whistles that accompanied the Telegraph's conversion to a converged web and print publication in the latter part of last year focused heavily on editorial.

As well as merging newsrooms, changes were also being made to the advertising model. In the months since, the travel section of the website has been used as a test bed for a personalised approach to classifieds.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Eamonn Leacy, product manager with Telegraph Media Group, said that search engine contextual ads carried alongside editorial tended to promote large organisations and the model was not serving the Telegraph's traditional advertising partners well.

"We looked at our classified market place, as opposed to display with its high-yield and high-branded campaigns, and we saw that 85 per cent was small advertisers who are very important to us because they complement our editorial content," he said.

"We have [in print] in excess of 1,000 advertisers, small, medium and tall. What we found was that a lot of our small niche clients, the individual cottages or hotels that we think are really strong to our brand, we did not have a solution for."

In conjunction with Adprecision, Telegraph developed a bespoke search engine for the niche area of the site and a page tagging system so that contextual ads created by the in-house sales team were delivered alongside relevant content.

The aim, according to Mr Leacy, was not to compete with Google but to offer a specific complementary service.

This enabled the publisher to provide its own super-relevant ads, said Mr Leacy, mixing its own large and small advertisers with contextual ads from search engines - while still controlling rates and the ability to offer cross-media promotion strategies.

He claimed that, in the three months following adoption of the new approach, 150 new advertisers - many of whom were the middle and smaller business that had appeared in the print product - were brought to the website to use its pay-per-click (PPC) model.

"Classified was always a market that was response driven. Online we looked at a number of different ways that we could do it and the PPC (Pay Per Click) model seems to be the way we are going," he said.

Mr Leacy added that there were not any immediate plans to transfer this model to other niche areas of the site as the travel project was still only about a 'quarter' done.

"It's a crude model presently but we feel it's better than what the larger search engines are giving at the moment," he said.

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