Advertisers Seek Better Reporting, Ad Models

A new report, “Online Buying Guides: Making Sense of What’s Happening Now” report from Infocommerce Group, identifies gaps between online advertisers’ needs and publishers’ delivery.

Demographic information is more important to advertisers than the number of visitors to a publisher’s site, particularly in the B2B space. Only 21 percent of advertisers are interested in a site’s overall traffic, versus 51 percent who prefer to hear about the site’s audience.

“[Publishers] don’t know all that much about the online audience, they tend to lead with the volume of people who come to the site,” Infocommerce Group President Russell Perkins, told ClickZ News. “They think about the numbers, advertisers want to look at what’s behind the numbers.”

Multi-channel publishers often tend to apply offline data to online applications, according to Perkins. “A lot of publishers will trot out their demographics from the print publication.”

Most publishers continue to offer standard display advertising options. Advertisers say they favor a pay-for-performance (PFP) model. PFP is attractive as it transfers the risk to publishers.

“[Advertisers] are thinking about [PFP],” said Perkins. “There’s uncertainty about whether the revenue will translate, most of them don’t have enough traffic to make pay-for-performance work.”

Another format Perkins says is hot is the hard sales lead. Companies such as KnowledgeStorm and GlobalSpec deliver customers on a per-lead basis. Both sales lead and performance models are costly propositions.

“[The hard sales lead] tends to be more expensive on a per-unit basis,” said Perkins. “They’re happy to pay it because it’s something they can really act on, not just a clickthrough.”