Online Media Buying (choosing who to advertise with online)

If you are choosing a website for online advertising, it is important to ask the following questions:

1. How long has the website been online?
Websites spring up all the time. Creating a school directory takes about a day. Many sites come and go, but those that have ranked highly and steadily for at least 5 years have a better chance of surviving and therefore giving you a good return on your investment.

2. How much targeted traffic does this website receive?
If a site does not receive any traffic, neither will you. The problem is that site owners can mislead potential advertisers with regard to the amount of traffic they get. Make sure you are logging the inbound traffic you are receiving.

Go to sites like www.alexa.com (owned by Amazon.com) and check out the traffic ranking for a site you are planning to advertise on, and then compare it with others. Make sure that the site you are advertising on is specific to the audience you are looking to attract.

We offer schools a free audit on any independent education oriented website they may be planning to advertising with.

3. Where does the traffic come from?

Web traffic comes from several different sources:

Search Engine Traffic
The vast majority of website traffic will come from organic or generic search results. This traffic will be governed by how well the website is found online by using the most popular keywords and phrases.

Reciprocal or Inbound Link Traffic
This is traffic coming in naturally, or organically, from links placed on other websites.

Affiliate Traffic
This is traffic that has been paid for by the website.

Offline Advertising
A lot of the major players in the industry who have been around for many years (like Gabbitas, ISC, etc) will receive reasonable levels of targeted traffic because of their good will and name recognition.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Traffic
This is traffic you can purchase from search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Mailing lists/Newsletters

Remember, not all traffic is the same. 400 visitors to a site may sound good, but if they have been fooled into coming there in the first place by using outrageous claims, they will not stay long. This might also reflect on your reputation as you will be associated with this.

If the site you are planning to buy advertising from receives traffic solely from PPC advertising, you may as well go straight to the search engine and pay them instead, by-passing the proxy advertising website.
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GOOGLE EXAMPLE

PAY PER CLICK (advertisements on the right hand side of the results screen)

ORGANIC LISTINGS (main search results left hand side)

The majority of a site’s traffic will come from generic search engine results. Only purchase advertising from websites that have high rankings in search engines like Google, using the top keywords and phrases people enter to learn about independent private schools.

Try this for yourself. Go to www.google.co.uk and search for:

Private Schools
Boarding Schools
Independent Schools
Prep Schools
Public Schools

If the site you are planning on advertising with is not listed in the top ten organic results, (not the PPC results of course) it's probably not worth it. get some help.