It's the season for sharing. I've been negotiating online ad deals from both sides of the table since 1996 and offer these observations. Do feel free to pass it on to others that might be interested.

The optimum strategy depends on what you are selling of course but beware that everyone will take your money and deliver page views. It's transactions that matter. The only metric that matters is the "look to buy" ratio because that is real money being expensed for either cost of goods sold or SG&A depending on how you wind up booking it.

Venue matters. Try not to place actual product in places where expectations of purchasing are not already high. It's the vendor's value-add to invest the time in teaching the audience that they are a couple of clicks away from buying not yours. Today this argues in favor of doing deals with eCommerce venues or seller networks over media or content outlets. The age old game of consignments and drop shipping works very well via the net. That's why you see so many of the same thing being sold on EBay at the same time and hundreds of websites selling the same product powered by those Yahoo Shopping carts. These venues work. Each EBay seller or cart site owner is a shop keeper who has direct contact with real buyers. The trick is to find them and you use the internet of course. The best and least cost way to find resellers is to type in keywords describing your product in four places. Google, MSFT Search, EBay and Yahoo. Make lists of the eCommerce operators and the most active sellers then contact them directly about being a channel for your product. The internet is about building armies of ants to move mountains of shipping containers.

Do plan an advertising campaign as much to attract channel outlets as to generate end user demand. For your advertising buys it's best to meter out the commitments in small stingy blocks. Never commit to big dollar campaigns no matter how charming the sales people are. Of course they are charming. They get commissions. What you need to make sure of is that you control the process and make the ad vendor work for every incremental dollar. Make them give you better placement in the best areas where the most active buyers are to get that next installment. They know where the fish are schooling inside their inventory. Here's the dirty laundry notation. Part of that sales person's job is to place ads into the empty water areas of their system to try to build up some response. You want a better deal before paying out your good money to be their guinea pig.

It's all about the accounting. Stay on top of the ad vendor to cut the price per click if the look-to-sales performance is too low. Your business interests are to keep your cost-to-profit ratios in line. Repeat with me "click-thru's are NOT purchases." Dump the ones that are not working leaving the door open a just crack to come come back with a more viable offer. Remember they already know that you are willing to write checks. Just mark you calendar with their quota due dates and wait for nature to take its course. If they don't call they probably weren't going to look out for your best interests anyway.

On the subject of search engines. The trick is to make them spider you not the other way around. Getting that to happen is a bit tricky. It typically takes me about a year to craft a system to get those machines to reliably spider my sites as part of their weekly refresh runs. Designing compelling websites for both machines and people is an art form. You know you are winning when you can get two links to come up on the first page returned for your chosen primary keyword and some more on page 2 or 3 for good measure. Saturation is king. But be forewarned that it's hard to do. These engines are actually pretty good at fighting redundancy.

Some practical notes. Google is the worst one to pull this off with. I'm convinced it suffers from bipolar disorder. It has way too much stale material that degrades one's efforts to poke out above the noise. Then again it may be on purpose as a way of frustrating you enough to consider the pay portion of the engine. The best of breed search engine in my opinion is MSFT's Search Engine, superb temporal relevance algorithm. The Google one you sometimes have to tickle a bit using that paid AdWords tool of theirs, just enough to wake up the spider once a quarter or so. If you see an AOL hit in your traffic logs from time to time that's really good. AOL caches everything and does not normally let their users see the outside world unless absolutely necessary. It was originally a backbone traffic economizing thing that seems to have morphed into a business plan to prevent competitors from getting to their subscribers. I'm going to bite my tongue on that one for now.

About paid keywords. Yes you can buy keywords but they are often ridiculously expensive for the best keywords particularly if there are corporations camping out on that word for investor relations or some other make nice because the SEC enforcement division might be watching purpose. On Google paid placements extinguish all too quickly then they make you pay to restart them over and over. That's what one calls a recurring revenue generating feature ladies and gentlemen. Other business models like the Yahoo/Overture one get you upfront with start-up fees . This entry fee money stuff did not used to be there but seems to have become a feature of the established engines.

Now here's the really bad news about keywords. You'll notice that EBay now seems to own the masthead real estate on many of the search engines displays. They have the money and deal making ability to overpower everyone and turn even a search engine into a support portal for their business. So it's back to my first point about working the eCommerce outlets who have already gotten on the search results lists.

If you follow this line of thinking you will wind up designing a portal format for your own website. It will serve to explain the benefits of the product and provide a list of vendors from whom someone can buy it. The usual strategy is to also have a shopping cart on your site that has the products available for full sticker mostly so that savvy buyers can feel good about going to your partner/outlets to save a few dollars.

Hope this information helps you plot your strategy.

Happy Holidays,
Dennis Santiago
EMBA 1991

Dennis Santiago has served as CEO, COO and CTO overseeing the design and development of numerous eCommerce and financial publishing online businesses since 1995. Prior to the growth of today's internet Dennis was active in the cooperative networking of dial-up electronic bulletin boards.