Yaro at Small Business Branding has written an article on how he tried to promote his business by sponsoring an event. He writes that even though there were around 2000 people at the event, the promotion only resulted in one enquiry.

I had almost the same experience when I placed an advertisment in a New Zealand property magazine. The magazine is published monthly and the ad was in three editions. It cost more than NZ$500 and I failed to generate any significant traffic to the site.

I think the problem with advertising a website in a magazine or any other medium is that the ad is “unclickable”. How many times have you seen an advertisment in the newspaper or magazine, thought to yourself that is interesting, I must look that up next time I am on the internet and then completely forget all about it.

That is why Google has been so successful with Adwords. When I ran an Adwords campaign on the site, I received targetted traffic. I knew exactly how much it would cost me to get a visitor to the site. It is possible for companies to calculate exactly how much it costs them to get a new customer and make a sale.