See the VPA's stances on 
New Media
It’s Hard to Top ‘Top Jobs’ for Online Ad Products
By Scott Bateman
VPA Online Media Consultant
Newspapers can easily build an online advertising product using their employment liner ads that will generate an 80 percent profit margin, high revenue and great customer response.
Yes, it is as good as it sounds, and yet many newspapers aren’t producing it. They don’t know about it, aren’t aware of how well it performs or think they don’t have the resources to produce it.
Most newspapers call the product Top Jobs. It typically displays five employment ads at a time in an online banner display ad that rotates throughout the newspaper’s Web site. The ads appear in the banner simply by showing the title. The Web site visitor clicks on the title, and the full text of the ad appears in a popup window or on a standard Web page. From there, the site visitor can click on an email link to the company or a link to the company’s Web site to fill out an application.
It simply is the best online advertising product I have ever seen based on margin, revenue, the clickthroughs of Web site visitors and therefore the response that advertisers receive for their job openings. In fact, I have known numerous examples of customers calling us to ask that we take down their ads because the response is so high and the quality good enough to fill the position.
Here is how it works:
A customer calls to place an employment ad in the newspaper. The classified rep at the other end asks if the customer wants to put the ad into the Top Jobs product on the newspaper’s Web site. If the customer says yes, the ad is processed in one of two ways. Either the rep copies and pastes the ad into the Top Jobs application, or the rep marks the ad so a script will capture the text and place it into the application.
If the rep copies and pastes the text, the application can be a Web-based form. The rep clicks on submit, and the ad goes into a small database. The online banner display ad uses a script that randomly pulls the ads from the database. Anyone with a medium level of technical skill should be able to build the application.
The banner ad rotates throughout the site or can appear on the employment classified section on the site. Site visitors love the product. I have seen clickthrough rates as high at 6 percent on some ads, which is more than 50 times the national average.
Top Jobs is an online advertising product that every newspaper should be selling.
Scott Bateman is an Internet consultant with the Virginia Press Association. He can be reached at (804) 521-7577 or .