Google has been releasing many different services based on offline marketing. They have been testing their magazine & newspaper print ads with select advertisers and publishing companies. There have been rumors of Google releasing a service to place commercials on TV channels. Now Google has decided to start offering services to let advertisers place commercials on popular radio stations - Audio Ads .

This new service was spotted as an advertisement while searching through Google and it looks like it's in a BETA stage and only accepting a few elite advertisers. From the looks of it, Google plans on offering their advertisers the ability to:

• Select from hundreds of radio stations across the U.S. to run your audio ads
• Target your customers by station type, demographics, and time of day
• View online reports that show you when and where your ad played
• Listen to real-time recordings of your ads as they were played on the radio

Up until now, many webmasters have been utilizing online marketing via Pay-Per-Click and advertisements to bring traffic to their websites. This can usually be because webmasters enjoy knowing where the traffic came from.

When receiving traffic from offline marketing, Google Analytics will always display the referrer as "Direct". So how would you be able to tell if they came to your website through offline marketing methods like Google Audio Ads? Simple, just put up a poll which checks the origin of traffic. If none is given, the poll is shown to the user. It could be through a pop-up as well, which will get their attention.

This way, you can get a good idea of where your visitors are coming from and how they heard of your website.  I think Google Audio Ads would be great for webmasters who run a website based off of a social community, like forums, pligg and such.

If you're interested, feel free to give them a call at their following departments:

New York: 212-994-4956

Atlanta: 404-487-9000

Chicago: 312-840-4153

Los Angeles: 310-694-2519

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 1:30 am and is filed under Website Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.