Our-Hometown.com, the leading innovator of profitable business solutions for community newspapers, announced today that the click through rates of its online print display ads far exceed typical web ads. In addition, the major search engines recognize these online display ads, generating even more traffic for advertisers.
Our-Hometown.com's patent pending technology puts preview images of the display ads next to the newspaper's online content that click through to full-size versions of the ads. Overall 1.40% of the time a newspaper web page is displayed with the preview ads, the reader's click on them to get the full version. This click through rate far exceeds the rate that typical web ads produce (0.61% according to DoubleClick's Q2 2003 Ad Serving Trend Report).
A recent improvement called "Search Engine Friendly Display Ads" allows the ads to be found on major search engines when users are looking for products and services that are advertised in the ads. After entering keywords, the ads are listed among the standard type listings returned by the search engines. When the text listing is clicked on, a full size image of the display ad appears. When these clicks are added, the rate grows to 1.93%.
If the advertiser had their web address in the original print ad, a link is automatically displayed in addition to the ad for the user's convenience. The ads have the added advantage that there is no extra work to create them for the web, because they are automatically extracted from the print edition.
The number of times the ads are clicked from search engines isn't dependent of the number of page views the newspaper's web site receives because it's the search engines that list them.
