Just Released: The Online Advertising Playbook

My copy of The Online Advertising Playbook just arrived today and I’m looking forward to discovering new strategies or those important reminders of what works and what doesn't. With a quick browse, I’m already enjoying the easy-to-find tip lists on things like “Seven Tips for Optimizing Pay-per-Click Copy” and “Nine Best Practices for Email Deliverability.” These aren’t always cutting-edge, but definitely smart reminders for creating or reviewing a campaign that’s about to hit the web. The book also includes a wide-variety of real advertising campaign evaluations, stories from the likes of John Deere, Holiday Inn Express, Lane Bryant, Vonage, and many many more.

While the focus is clearly on for-profit sales and loyalty promotions, there is a bit of information that can be applied to nonprofit online advertising programs – dayparting, geo-targeting, email habits, media usage, and more… Just a few slices of useful info I’ve gleaned so far:
- “Emailed coupons are effective purchase incentives and drive sales. Three-quarters of online purchasers redeemed an online coupon, and almost 60% redeemed an online coupon at an offline location.” I'm looking forward to the challenge of leveraging the coupon concept for donations or advocacy efforts!
- “9 out of 10 email users check their computers, BlackBerrys, or other portable devices several times a day.”
- The least popular online ad types are the most intrusive. Out-of-frame ads, pop-under ads, and pop-up ads. “Between 85 and 90% gave these ads the lowest marks, with the lowest of all given to pop-ups.”

Thanks to the Advertising Research Foundation for a fresh look at online advertising.

Comments

[Steve Rappaport]

Thank you for the kind review of The Online Advertising Playbook, which I co-authored. Although our focus was on the commercial side, I have a lot of experience working with nonprofits and foundations. Please feel free to email questions you have that concern strategy to me: steve@thearf.org. I'll do my best to reply to you.

[Jenn Thompson]

Steve,
Thanks for making yourself available for questions!