As part of our new Demographic Targeting feature on Gourmet Ads, one of the new targeting options for advertisers is Household Income Targeting. This new targeting option is ideal for any advertisers who are looking to target consumers with the total household income as the main metric for the campaign.

The level of household income can be a significant driver in relation to the making a purchase decision for a product. Household Income Targeting can target populations with higher or lower buying power. As such the 5 segments advertisers can target include;

• $0-29K
• $30-39K
• $40-49K
• $50-75K
• $75K+

So what are some examples of advertisers using Household Income Targeting for campaigns?

• Food Coupon company wanting to reach low income households
• Gourmet Food company (ie truffles, caviar etc) wanting to reach high household incomes
• Cereal company wanting to reach low to medium income households
• Kitchen Appliances company wanting to reach an affluent consumer
• Winery wanting to reach high worth individuals for their premium wine club
• Automotive Company wanting to reach different income levels with different vehicles

This new targeting option provides advertisers the ability to greater reach their target audience and they are available now. So if you’d like to use our new demographic targeting options on your next campaign, Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

Nearly every campaign which runs on the Gourmet Ads network has some sort of targeting applied to it. Some of the targeting used includes Geo targeting, time day part, frequency capping etc. In addition to the full suite of targeting options, we can now announce the newest targeting options on Gourmet Ads is the ability to target by US Demographic Targeting.

The new US demographic targeting feature enables advertisers to target line items to US ZIP codes based on underlying demographic characteristics derived from projected census data for the current year. For each demographic metric, the US population is divided into five groups each representing a segment of the US population.

With this new targeting feature you can target by the following metrics:

• Median household income
• Median age
• Children in household
• Owner-occupied household
• Employment level

This new targeting option provides advertisers the ability to greater reach their target audience and they are available now. Over the next few days we’ll be writing about each of the demographic targeting options and offering some ideas on how you can use them – Read the demographic targeting blogs here

So if you’d like to use our new demographic targeting options on your next campaign, Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

Many publishers who participated saw significant growth in their traffic, one experienced a 300% increase in traffic after they implemented just a few of our suggestions. The reason we developed this program was simple – we’re commited to developing the traffic of our publishers and helping reach more people online.

Our Traffic Booster Program program now runs all the time, so no matter when you join, you’ll get the 36 tasks on how to increase your traffic. When new publishers of recipes sites and food blogs join the Gourmet Ads network we highly recommend they participate in the program.

If you publish a recipe site or food blog and want to join our free program visit the Gourmet Ads Traffic Booster page.

For publishers that are not part of the Gourmet Ads network, then you can apply here.

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

Gourmet Ads works with well-known brands right around the world and one of the important things we strive to deliver each and every day is a brand safe environment for our advertisers and their ad agencies.

So what does a brand safe environment mean? A brand safe environment is one where advertisers can be rest assured that their advertising will run on approved premium websites. There has been unscrupulous ad networks in the past who’ve been trafficking premium brand advertising across brand-damaging objectionable content, causing major PR issues for all of those involved.

The Gourmet Ads Brand Safe Environment
We believe that technology sometimes has its flaws, so we prefer to use a manual process, coupled with technology to ensure our brand safe environment. As such Gourmet Ads ensures a brand safe environment for advertisers in three separate ways;

1. Transparency to Advertisers
   Prior to any advertising campaign going live, we provide advertisers a full list of sites that are part of Gourmet Ads. We do of course add sites all the time, but overall we do offer total transparency for our Brand Safe Environment.

2. Hand Selected Editorially Selected Recipes Sites
   Websites can’t just join Gourmet Ads and start serving ads straight away. First off every site must meet our selection criteria (detailed here) and then they are manually reviewed. Each of URL is then screened by our publishing team for both theme and content. Because we know the food and recipe space, we know very quickly if we want them part of Gourmet Ads. Some ad networks have the reputation of taking any publisher that comes through the door, and unfortunately many do. We’re proud of our high rejection rate!

3. Tagging of Approved Sites
   Apart from simply adding sites to Gourmet Ads – each site is tagged with keywords for additional trafficking. i.e sample tags include for “Above the Fold” and “Privacy Policy”. So if a advertiser only wanted to run with sites that have a Privacy Policy we can easily traffic this.

4. URL Restrictions
   Apart from the manual process detailed above, our final check is via technology, ensuring that ads are only served on approved URLs and that our ad tags are not trafficked across other sites.

For more about the Gourmet Ads network, Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

This year Easter is the first week of April (dates below) and even if you don’t sell chocolate Easter eggs there are significant opportunities over the holiday period for all types of industries. Once regarded simply for the kids, Easter has become one of the most profitable holiday seasons of the year.

With spring in the air and many consumers possessing tax return money makes it an ideal time for you to kick-start your marketing campaign. As such we thought we’d put together a few Easter advertising ideas separated by various sectors.

Retailers
Given that Easter is of course a holiday period, many retailers run Easter Sales and to drive interest in the lead up is important. So running at least 10 days prior to the sale starting is essential, then upping the visibility over the Easter weekend to drive consumers in store. Ideally you’ll be running discounts off big ticket items and winter apparel.

Grocery & Supermarkets
With many people spending time with the family over Easter it’s important to gain market share in the lead up to the Easter Weekend. Ideally your Easter Advertising will feature creative with messaging to drive consumers in store like discounts off key staples items or loss leader activity encourage them to do their Easter “big shop” while in store.

Travel Companies
With most people spending time with their families over the Easter weekend, there are two opportunities here for travel companies. Firstly, with many people head home there is a significant benefit for companies such as airlines to go heavy up 3-4 weeks prior to Easter, then slow it down closer to the weekend. The 2nd opportunity is for people not heading home, but rather going away for the weekend. So vacation specials should be advertised 10-14 days from Easter weekend. See Grocery Buyers make Travel Decisions.

Ecommerce Sites
Many of the major ecommerce retailers run Easter weekend specials, from free shipping to coupon discounts so why let them have all the business? In the lead up to Easter why not run a campaign targeted at consumers with creative indicating your Easter specials. So no matter if you sell food, clothing or kitchen gadgets, Easter is a great time to boost sales.

Movie Releases
Many over the Easter weekend will be looking for things to do to fill out the weekend. So for the movie studios, running movie trailer campaigns for new release in the days prior and over the Easter weekend will help boost a movies weekend revenues.

Automotive Companies & Dealerships
Consumers in the market for a new auto will dedicate the weekend heading to dealerships and doing test drives. So running a campaign in the 5-7 days prior to Easter, then heavy up over the Easter weekend will no doubt result in leads being generated. Learn about our audience of automotive buying Grocery Buyers.

So as we head in Q2 and with only a few weeks to go till Easter now is the time to book your Easter Advertising Campaign. For more information, Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.

2010 Easter Dates
Good Friday is 2nd April 2010
Holy Saturday 3rd April 2010
Easter Sunday 4th April 2010
Easter Monday 5th April 2010

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

Gourmet Ads is currently seeking London based Food Bloggers to join our UK network.

So what are we looking for?
Ideally you’ll be producing your own recipe and food content on a regular basis and have a great base of traffic, but most importantly you’ll be based in the UK. This is important as some advertisers only want to advertise on UK based sites. Join the Gourmet Ads network now.

We’ll totally manage your advertising inventory and provide monthly revenue. Other key features and benefits of Gourmet Ads for publishers include;

• Non-exclusive relationship
• Majority of advertisers are companies in the food, wine, beer, travel and lifestyle space.
• CPM based advertising campaigns
• Sponsorship advertising campaigns
• Advertising Reporting Portal
• Ability to run your own house ads
• Flexibility and scalability – we can manage some or all of your inventory
• Strong focus on advertising campaigns in UK, USA and Canada
• Monetize your content globally – sales teams in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Sydney

You may have your own internal sales teams or be part of another ad network. That’s fine with us, because we offer a non-exclusive relationship which means you can use the Gourmet Ads network as back fill. We ask that if you do work with another ad network that you offer all networks an equal allocation.

Finally, for all publishers we offer a free program to help increase your traffic, called the Gourmet Ads Traffic Booster Program.

So if you have a recipe site or food blog that you’d like to monetize, Join the Gourmet Ads network now.

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

The other day I was reading an old article in the New York Times about how offering Free Shipping on your ecommerce site can significantly increase sales. The article discusses and shares insight into the strategies of the some of the most popular online stores and how they price their shipping and how it can greatly impact sales. Read the article here – Nothing Says ‘Buy’ Like ‘Free Shipping’ .

The Free Shipping Article had me thinking about how a company which was going to offer free shipping for a period of time and how they would promote the offer. Naturally I think most only stores undertaking a free shipping promotion would do two things. First they would put some sort of promotional messaging on their sites advising prospective customers that they might qualify for free shipping on their first order. Secondly, an ecommerce store offering free shipping would reach out to their existing customer with an EDM of sorts advising that for their next order the shipping is free. Another idea is advertising free shipping, but I’ll get back to that in a moment.

What I think most online stores forget is that free shipping could be a great lead generation strategy to build sales. A few years ago I was involved in an online store start up as a consultant. Well before the successful bricks and mortar company started building their new start up website, they undertook a market research study to identify customer ideals, which they assumed were very different from their existing bring and mortar customers.

The number one thing that came from the market research was that customers online were more likely to make a purchase on their new site if the shipping was free, opposed to paying a premium for the delivery. So the company went into the new ecommerce site with the marketing tactic that customers would never pay for shipping. They simply built the shipping into the price point. The result; sales exploded for them and they’ve never looked back. The site has turned out to be a multimillion dollar online business and I believe that it’s because of their foundation that customers will never pay for shipping.

Ok, so you’ve decided to run a free shipping promotion. So apart from reaching out to customers on your site or your existing customer base, you should consider running an advertising campaign to market your free shipping campaign. By advertising free shipping you’re removing one of the hurdles that many online stores face and reaching out to gaining new customers. It could be the best lead generation campaign you’ve ever run.

Apart from simply running your free shipping advertising across our entire network of grocery buyers, we can help develop your advertising creative. It’s important for the creative to indicate that you’re offering free shipping. Don’t put the key message in a small font, make it stand out in bold and gain attention.

For more information about running your free shipping advertising with Gourmet Ads, Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

For advertising agencies and companies who’ve had incremental budgets become available for March, the last month of Q1, check out Gourmet Ads March advertising packages.

Our March advertising packages feature extremely competitive CPM rates and once again we’ve included high visibility ad units including Intersitial Advertising and Floating Ads which are ideal for any food company or CPG advertiser who wants to reach the main household grocery buyer. Priced this month at US$15k and US$35k all packages feature high profile placements together with regular display units. As always we’d be happy to further customize each of the packages depending on your campaign targets and desired reach.

Additionally we are happy to extend these campaigns for 30 days from the start date opposed to just 30 days. So if you book your campaign to start on the 12^th of March, it will go through to the 12^th April.

If you’d like to check out our March Advertising Packages, simply go to the Contact Us page and mention “March Advertising Packages” in the message field and we’ll email them together with our Media Kit. Providing you have advertising creative ready to go. The team at Gourmet Ads can turn around a campaign in less than 24 hours.

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

Gourmet Ads is currently seeking UK recipe sites and UK food blogs to join our UK network.

So what are we looking for?
Ideally you’ll be producing your own recipe and food content on a regular basis and have a great base of traffic, but most importantly you’ll be based in the UK. This is important as some advertisers only want to advertise on UK based sites. Join the Gourmet Ads network now.

We’ll totally manage your advertising inventory and provide monthly revenue. Other key features and benefits of Gourmet Ads for publishers include;

• Non-exclusive relationship
• Majority of advertisers are companies in the food, wine, beer, travel and lifestyle space.
• CPM based advertising campaigns
• Sponsorship advertising campaigns
• Advertising Reporting Portal
• Ability to run your own house ads
• Flexibility and scalability – we can manage some or all of your inventory
• Strong focus on advertising campaigns in UK, USA and Canada
• Monetize your content globally – sales teams in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Sydney

You may have your own internal sales teams or be part of another ad network. That’s fine with us, because we offer a non-exclusive relationship which means you can use the Gourmet Ads network as back fill. We ask that if you do work with another ad network that you offer all networks an equal allocation.

Finally, for all publishers we offer a free program to help increase your traffic, called the Gourmet Ads Traffic Booster Program.

So if you have a recipe site or food blog that you’d like to monetize, Join the Gourmet Ads network now.

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed

Gourmet Ads is currently in the process of being included in Comscore and as a publisher in our network you’ve probably received a request from our publishing team to sign a Traffic Assignment Letter (TAL) which is located here. We thought it was important to write a short blog explaining this further and why it’s essential for increasing revenue on your site.

What is Comscore?
Comscore is a NASDAQ listed company which provides web business digital market intelligence on sites and audiences. Comscore is the preferred measurement service for many online companies and  provides networks like Gourmet Ads independently audited statistics of our entire audience.

Digital Advertising Agencies
Comscore provides media buyers and media planners software to better understand audiences, quickly and easily. Nearly every advertising agency around the globe uses some sort media planning software from Comscore. So being listed with us provides visibility through to agency staff for your site or blog. Because most sites have low traffic they don’t automatically appear in Comscore, so this is a great opportunity to be listed.

Audience numbers
Having third party audited audience numbers from Comscore is a bit like having Google Analytics across every site in our network. This allows media buyers to understand the reach of the Gourmet Ads Network. This is extremely important for brand advertisers who are interested in reaching as many people as possible for their campaigns.

Understanding the audience data
One of the greatest advantages of using Comscore is that media buyers can dig deeper into audience data ie how many kids in a household, how often they go to the supermarket etc. This once again allows the media buyer to analyze our network in consideration to running a campaign for an advertiser.

So what do you have to do?
All you need to do is fill out the Comscore letter at the link below, sign the form and then you’re done.
http://www.gourmetads.com/publishers/comscore

Gourmet Ads is a Vertical Advertising Network specialising in Food Advertising, Wine Advertising and Beer Advertising on the Adify Platform. We also provide Advertising Agencies both Media Planning and digital strategy, look out for new site Grocery Coupons. Follow us on Twitter or on Friend Feed