Regional market of Internet advertising and sites. And how are you?

My company has been working in Penza for several years now - we are engaged in online advertising and website building. The quality of most of the Internet sites in the region leaves much to be desired despite the fact that some web studios are over 10 years old (I’m talking about the age of the market), and the number of developers is several dozen.

For reference, Penza has been around for almost 350 years, the population of the region is about 1,400,000 people, transport, infrastructure, etc., is at a high enough level and it is hardly possible to call the region a backward region.

Given the Internet penetration of about 50% (according to the FOM at the beginning of 2013), the question arose, why is everything so sad in the development of websites and online advertising?
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In August 2013, we conducted a small study of the Penza market of Internet advertising and site building. The purpose of the study is to understand what stage the online advertising market is in our region and what are the prospects for its development. Unfortunately, we have no data for the past year. Not by the number of sites or even by the number of enterprises.

I wonder how things are in other regions? Friends, share your experiences and opinions. For the clumsiness of diagrams, I apologize.

What is bad Penza sites?

Despite the fact that according to the Public Opinion Foundation, at the end of 2012 in the Volga region every second uses the Internet constantly, there are not so many sites in Penza that reflect the essence of the company thanks to high-quality materials, photos, and design.

We evaluated sites by the following criteria:

• Relevance of information and working contacts, feedback forms. For example, weed out sites with news "for the last year" or incorrectly specified phones.
• Compliance with the design, content and technical part of the expectations of customers and the requirements of online promotion.
  For example, sites with foreign advertising banners on free domains and resources with unequivocally poor content (photos taken by a soap box, texts that cannot be read even by a person with 100% vision) were sent to "scrap".

Of the 8,000 companies that we found in online directories and printed catalogs, 1,400 sites have websites (it’s worth considering that one company can have 2-3 resources). About 300 sites are well represented on the Internet.

That is, we can say that only 21% of Penza’s sites are suitable for promotion, 79% are no good. The number of Penza companies that are ready for the integrated promotion of goods and services on the Internet, was at the level of only 3.7%.

About 500 companies also have storefronts and mini-sites on banner platforms that are popular in the region (bazarpnz.ru, e58.ru, tiu.ru and other services, some also have full-fledged versions of sites).

These companies may well use some additional types of online advertising (for example, contextual) to get an additional audience.

Portraits of various artists

According to the results of a survey and analysis of the print press, radio, TV and "outdoor advertising", we found out that Penza businessmen prefer to use traditional methods of advertising more often, which are sometimes an order of magnitude more expensive than Internet technologies. As a result, the budget is allocated to the site on a residual basis. Apparently this is a consequence of the fact that in Penza there are not so many radio, TV channels, glossy magazines, and there are about 80 developers. You can easily find the cheapest solution. But, as a rule, they are used by those who act according to the “strategy of presence on the Internet”. Failure to understand the principles of working with the Internet leads to a zero result. As a result, entrepreneurs are disappointed and assure themselves that the Internet does not work and high-quality websites are not needed.

The key to successful promotion is to communicate with your customers at all sites where your audience is, in order to understand which of them are most effective in each particular case. The quality of traditional advertising in Penza is still much higher than on the regional Internet, but sometimes it is also higher in cost compared to promotion on the Web. You can verify this by going to the advertising section on the website of any regional media.

The average cost of advertising on the radio of Penza is about 300 rubles for a 15-second video and 700 rubles for a 60-second video. On TV - from 3,000 to 80,000 rubles, depending on the length and number of repetitions of a clip (15,000 rubles for 6 outputs, 80,000 - for 21 outputs of a 20-second clip). Placing a banner on the advertising structure in the city of Penza averages 17,000 per month. Magazine placement - from 10,000 to 40,000 per lane.

A decent website can be made from 50 000 rubles, to ensure effective promotion - from 10-12 thousand rubles per month.
As we have said, spending on advertising in traditional media, companies do not feel the need to pay a lot for advertising on the Internet. Although the purchasing power and activity of Internet users is on average higher than that of the traditional advertising audience. Given the lower cost and the possibility of transparent assessment of the results of advertising campaigns, the Internet, as a channel for selling its goods and services, remains at least undervalued.

Interestingly, most of the sites, unsuitable for the promotion of their products and services, were the sites of companies that advertise in print and on TV. This is very strange, given the high-quality videos, photographs, layout and texts written by editors and journalists, as well as the fact that the cost of the goods offered is clearly not in the economy segment. The product or service, shown in the best light on the pages of magazines and television, turned out to be completely unpresentable on the pages of the Internet. It is simply impossible to continue communication with a possible buyer using advertising materials of different quality. After reading an attractive article, and after seeing the site, a potential client loses all desire to go to the advertised store or salon.

What do customers say?

We sent out a questionnaire of 10 questions by mail to 3,000 Penza companies. Unfortunately, the number of completed questionnaires turned out to be much less than we expected, so we summarized the results only where the amount of data received is adequate for unambiguous conclusions.

Quality and average cost of developing Penza sites

Sites worth 20,000 rubles or less still prevail in Penza. As an alternative, services of mini-sites and storefronts are used.

Price tags for professional websites of leading web studios start at an average of 50,000 rubles (in most cases this is a product catalog and company information). For this amount, the customer receives: the development of technical specifications, individual design, information management system on the site, filling the resource with the customer's materials.

The survey results show that most of the sites that are made for Penza customers are still performed by freelancers who are responsible for the entire development process. Unfortunately, in modern conditions it is impossible to be the best in everything. You either develop as a designer, or as a programmer or copywriter. This once again confirms the results of our parallel study of sites of Penza companies, the quality of most of which leaves much to be desired.

Slice by company activity

The number of sites and the availability of the most expensive resources lead the service sectors (only 11% do not have their own website) and production (12% do not have their own website).

Promotion and tracking of online advertising effectiveness

Only 18% of respondents track the effectiveness of advertising in terms of return on investment. This suggests that most companies do not have an understanding of how effectively advertising campaigns are conducted, whether it is necessary to invest more / less money and how effectively the site works. In fact, it turns out work for the sake of work, and not for the sake of result.

The following diagrams show that a full analysis of the effectiveness of advertising is carried out by less than half of the respondents. This is especially true of companies working for Penza consumers.



We get a vicious circle: companies do not track feedback from customers, which means they don’t know who they are and how they need to change the site for them, what advertising methods actually work and what funds to invest in to make advertising effective.

Preference for integrated promotion and analytics is given by companies that have already changed several site options.

Those who work with the first and second versions of sites mainly use search engine promotion and only track positions in search engines. Unfortunately, this approach does not provide any information for analyzing the volume of the audience that comes to the site, or the concept of its quality. There’s no need to talk about tracking profits.

Disappointing conclusions

If you project the survey data on 300 sites that are ready for integrated promotion (and it involves working closely with the analytics of the audience of promoted sites), then the potential number of companies that can really firmly occupy their niche on the Internet and adjust the advertising strategy as they work. -160 of more than 8,000 enterprises operating in Penza and the region.

Unfortunately, the market for online advertising and the level of sites in the Penza region remains at the level of the early 2000s and is developing very slowly. Despite the large number of enterprises in the region and a sufficient number of web studios and advertising agencies, customers prefer cheaper solutions in the field of the Internet and more expensive in traditional advertising. This leads to a discrepancy between the image of the enterprise in the minds of consumers and what they really are. A company may offer a really good product or service, but show it on the Internet in such a way that no one wants to have business with them.

* Sources for the analysis of companies and websites were Penza's online directories (e58.ru and others), free print media (Expensive Pleasure, SD, Penza Business Journal, etc.), Penza web studio portfolio.