New! google lets you purchase land for $20/acre

Originally written for Cheezhead.com

Ok, so they aren't really selling land, but with their purchase power and brain power, It is only a matter of time. However, they have recently stuck their hands in the radio advertising cookie jar - here's our story.

In running our job board, JobCircle.com, one of my goals is to try and brand the board to as many jobseekers as we can, both passive and active candidates. Print, billboards, TV, radio - whatever it is, if we can get good value from it, then we'll buy it.

As you probably know, Google bought a bunch of airtime inventory from Clear Channel and Nassau Broadcasting a while back, and are now making this inventory available for purchase through an online bidding system. So, naturally, when Google introduced this bidding system, Audio Ads, my marketing director and I decided to give it a try. We went into our Google account and clicked on the Audio Ads tab. We selected a region (we chose Philadelphia), and then told Google that we only want daypart 6a - 8p (gotta hit those drive-time commuters) on weekdays. We specified our budget ($1000) and our desired campaign duration.

Now, I'm sure that many of you have had the experience making a radio buy. Your city might have 12 different radio stations - some reach diversity candidates, some reach males 12-54, some reach females 5-95 - and of course, every sales rep says that they are number one in such and such demographic. Prices are all over the place and it is so difficult to understand what you're really buying. It's a painful thing. So we clicked submit, and my PC churned for a few seconds, and then I almost fell of my chair when the Google quote told us that we could get approximately one million impressions (listeners), generated from approximately 1250 commercials. This came out to about $1.43 for a 30 second commercial. This can't be right.

In reading further, we learned that Google uses Arbitron ratings to calculate impressions.  Now, arguably, Arbitron may not be the most accurate (although they are now starting use people meters to "detect" the radio frequency in the proximity of the wearer instead of the archaic manual sampling system they've used in the past), but still - this sounded like a great opportunity!

So, credit card in hand, we signed up. We chose an ad production company from the list of pre-approved Google vendors, bid $200 to any company who could produce the 30-second spot for us, and found a great company in New York City. They produced a radio spot that an ad agency probably would have charged $2K to make, and we uploaded it to Google for approval (listen to the spot).

A few days later we were in business! They played our spots, sometimes a few hundred per day, and we'd get a nice neat report at the end of the day detailing the stations it played on, number of impressions, and cost. So how did it go, you ask? At the end of two weeks, we spent $1046.58, received 1,033,044 impressions, and had a whopping 1,515 ad plays. Do the math. We got 1,515 30-second spots (or 757.5 hours) of branding on terrestrial radio, and paid .00101 cent per impression, averaging .69 cents per commercial. Insane. While all of our competitors are paying $5.00 for the keyword "Philadelphia left-handed dentist jobs" with Google Adwords, we're paying .00101 per impression and jobseekers are hearing our message 200 times a day - unbelievable!

Now, think about the long-term ramifications of this. Right now, we got a good deal because no one else is doing this. Of course, the cost per impression will rise, just like Adwords did, and it will get more expensive over time. However, no calls to the ad agency, no need to deal with all of pain-in-the-neck radio reps who say their station is number #1 - just a couple of clicks, and I'm on the radio - power to the people! Then, my entrepreneurial wheels started churning…could we sell recruiters 100 radio spots with each job posting purchase on our site? Could we sell jobseekers a "radio resume", broadcasting their skillsets to over 1 million potential hiring listeners? At $.69 a spot, there's a lot of markup in there! Google has once again proven that they can take a complex process and make it easy.

But enough about Audio Ads. I need to go to Google Land to check my $2.00/acre bid for waterfront property...