We've been trying it out on a limited basis. You pick show-level targeting, set a max CPM (cost per thousand households) bid, and a max daily budget. Then, after it runs, you get reports about # of impressions, etc.
It clearly brings a lot of traffic when it runs, and those do clearly turn into some sales (self-reported in our post-checkout survey). We don't yet have enough data to know whether it pays for itself.
If you want some "orders of magnitude" numbers to play with, we're talking about a few bucks per thousand households CPM rates, with a "click through rate" (visitors per watching household) in the few-tenths-of-a-percent range (hard to track but we try). We're still trying to nail down those numbers, but it seems to be a fairly expensive way to find visitors (although within an order of magnitude of other methods, so we're hoping that with tweaking of bids/message/targeting we can make it comparable, because it scales to massive volume really well if you can afford it!).
Did you do the commercial yourselves or hire an outside firm? Also, your logo is pretty confusing. It took me a while to actually realize that it was the logo for NerdKits while watching that commercial.
I did the sketches (pencil+paper+scanner), my co-founder did the music + video compositing of the commercial, and we paid $100 for the voiceover. We're DIY people so we had to give it a shot ourselves first. :-)
Very nice! I experimented with it as well, and found that it wasn't quite worth the cost compared to other methods (though my commercial wasn't as nice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyFzZPhgMTQ )
Did you go for repeat showings to the same people, or did you try to show to as many people as possible once?
Repeat showing to the same shows (MythBusters, etc) -- although I don't think that necessarily implies the same people. In fact, it seems impossible to control whether to show it multiple times in a single 30-min slot, etc.
Ah I see. They give an estimate of number of impressions and number of uniques, so you can get a rough average viewings/person. I believe that it never shows more than once per show (or 30 minute slot), so it's just an estimate of viewer return rate from showing to showing, I believe.
I've often thought of trying Adwords for TV. Several years ago I used to make animated commercials for cable TV and one of the major hassles was getting airtime on cable stations. Has anyone tried it?
Page says I need to graduate from starter edition to standard edition to try it. Instructions can be found "here". Click here and I get "page not available". Some other page says there starter editions no longer even exist. Maybe the error message is wrong, and should say I cannot use it because I'm not in the USA.
This page http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/how.html seems to indicate that the maximum video upload size is 100MB. This seems awfully small for broadcast-quality video. I guess it's only 30 seconds or so, but still.
They're doing an A/B test using Google Website Optimizer. You can see the Javascript footprint if you know what to look for.
Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever seen Google using GWO. It is not good software -- for one thing, this thread exists where if they were doing good A/B testing it wouldn't. I used to joke that they'd swallow broken glass before using it on a site which actually mattered to their business interests. Guess I was wrong. (Although they won't be putting it on any app anytime soon.)
Have you tried out the multivariate experiment type in Optimizer? Unlike the "classic" A/B test, there's effectively no risk of exposing the fact that someone is part of an experimental group to normal users. (Of course, HN types could still pick out the telltale JS fragments in the page source, but that's a risk with any testing that has a client-side component.)
We've been pretty happy with GWO's combination of being a) free, b) easy for marketing+management types to use for reporting, and c) integrated with our Analytics and AdWords accounts.
Just out of curiosity, though: are there competitive hosted solutions you would recommend over GWO? More options would be a good thing to know about...
Actually I have seek risk of such A/B testing where different URLs are involved. People will bookmark, blog, email all these different URLs and then (when your test gets over) you are left doing 301 redirects from such URLs to your original URL.
It clearly brings a lot of traffic when it runs, and those do clearly turn into some sales (self-reported in our post-checkout survey). We don't yet have enough data to know whether it pays for itself.
If you want some "orders of magnitude" numbers to play with, we're talking about a few bucks per thousand households CPM rates, with a "click through rate" (visitors per watching household) in the few-tenths-of-a-percent range (hard to track but we try). We're still trying to nail down those numbers, but it seems to be a fairly expensive way to find visitors (although within an order of magnitude of other methods, so we're hoping that with tweaking of bids/message/targeting we can make it comparable, because it scales to massive volume really well if you can afford it!).
Our current 30-second spot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTM2AVeyEMg