For the entire month of February, I decided to put an advert in the Business Opportunity section of Exchange and Mart.

Basically, this was a rather expensive test to see the kind of response an ad would generate.

It was a very simple experiment:

I paid for one 5x5cm “Photo Spot” for 4 weeks at £45 + VAT per week.

Total spend = £211

I set everything up with a new tracking domain so that I could be sure that any hits I got to my site were coming directly from that advert and that advert only.

Net gain for me per sale would be around £22 so I needed to sell about 10 to break even.

The advert started on the 1st February.

Results:

OK, first week I got 51 hits – and at this point I knew this wouldn’t be a success.

2nd week I got 58 hits, 3rd week 54 and in the 4th week I got 80 hits.

Total hits = 243

Which worked out at about 87p per visitor – not cheap considering that this type of advertising is not very targetted.

After all that, I didn’t get a single sale so it wasn’t a success and I pulled the plug.

The rep at Exchange and Mart called to ask if I wanted to extend the advert – I said a definite NO!

He then tried to cross-sell me into a smaller, less expensive advert but I pointed out to him that the response was miniscule with a reasonably large advert so it could only get worse with less surface area on the page.

Eventually, he admitted defeat.

So, my first test of offline advertising and it flopped.

However, at least now I know what kind of response to expect from Exchange and Mart.

So, time for a feedback request:

Have you ever run an advert offline to point at a website?

Where did you run it?

Was it expensive?

Was it a success?

Any tips?

Please leave any feedback by clicking on the “Comments” link below. Or, you can email me at the usual address.

In the meantime I am testing and tracking other sources for advertising so please expect some more results in the future…