Profiting from the team Website – Part 2 of 5

I recently wrote a piece for the “Team Marketing Report” newsletter. Here is part 2 of 5.

2. Is there a way to make that advertising targeted to specific geographic areas?

Indeed. And this dovetails nicely with your first question about ad pricing on the web. We have found that 75% of our Website visitors come from outside Indiana, but 80% of our sponsors are local, with trading areas inside Indiana.

When you stop to think about it, a sponsor that has a strictly local trade area can’t benefit too much from the national or international exposure which is possible on the Web. Realizing this we implemented a software application called an “ad server” which allows us to serve ads to visitors based on the physical location of the visitor’s computer. In other words, it’s possible to show different ads to people based on where they live. This becomes more important when you realize that after Indianapolis, more visitors come to our site from Louisville, and Dallas and five other cities than any other city in Indiana.

This chart shows the top 10 US cities driving Colts.com traffic in October 2006. Only 10% of overall traffic to the site came from visitors inside Indianapolis. Over 5% of total site traffic came from Louisville. Bloomington, IN came in 9th with less than 1% of traffic.

The ad server technology isn’t perfect, but it does give us the means to segment our circulation. As of the 2006 season we’re giving our local sponsors only the local impressions that are most valuable to them. Because these local impressions are in shorter supply, and higher demand, we can charge a premium for them.

In the process we have uncovered a vast inventory of impressions on the national level that are unsold. Remember, 75% of our visitors come from outside Indiana. We are now in the process of learning how to sell that inventory to national advertisers, and this is where we are experimenting with selling advertising in addition to sponsorships. Because we offer standard ad sizes, we have been able to get in on ad buys through national media buying firms. That’s a long story. But suffice to say that the very first dollar we made from “national” ads was a big day for us.

On the national front, I think we would benefit greatly from a league-wide network that would allow sponsors an efficient means of placing banners on any or all of the 32 club sites. Such a network would make sense for sponsors and teams alike. We’ll talk more about that in future posts.