Ads on Niche Sites Get Better Results

By Rieva Lesonsky

Do you advertise your products and services online, and wish you could afford ads on huge, well-known sites with tons of traffic? Well, be careful what you wish for, because you might be better off not getting it.

In the world of print advertising, small businesses usually get better results by advertising in niche publications than in general-interest ones with mass audiences of widely divergent people. Now, new research shows that the same may hold true in the online world.

A report recently released by ContextWeb studied more than 1,000 ad campaigns and found that ads placed on long-tail sites — those with an overall reach less than 1.5 percent of the Internet population — got significantly higher click-through rates than ads on larger websites. Specifically, ads on long-tail sites received 24 percent more clicks.

All 20 of the advertiser industries in the study saw click-through gains, with the top category seeing a 50 percent increase in click-throughs.

Confused by the long-tail and short-tail concept? A short-tail site is one that has tons of users in all kinds of demographics—say, MSNBC.com or Yahoo!. A long-tail site has far fewer users, but they’re more passionate and engaged, looking for one specific product or topic. In magazine terms, Time would be a short-tail publication while Model Train Monthly would be a long-tail one. It costs a lot to advertise in Time, but if you wanted to advertise your model trains, where do you think you would be more likely to find interested readers?

The study could have major effects on how advertisers choose where to place their ads. Currently, advertisers often seek to place their ads on short-tail sites (in fact, the study reported that 70 percent of display ad spending goes to such sites). In reality, however, Internet users age 18 and up actually spend just 14 percent of their time online at short-tail sites. This makes long-tail advertising a cost-effective way to reach the same audience and potentially boost your business’s sales while saving substantially on ad costs. Talk about a win-win situation.

Image by Flickr user Ben Heine (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Marketing, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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