Effects of advertising on CanadianISP and their costs

March 16, 2017

Your choice in where you spend your advertising dollars is a critical one. One of the most difficult issues to deal with is to see numbers that actually relate not only to your industry, but to you and your competitors who are offering the same or similar services to your own, for the simple reason of being able to see an "apples to apples" comparison.

Here, we show you the traffic stats for five ISPs on CanadianISP; Four of them are paid advertisers and one is not. The ISP using the free listing available to all ISPs across Canada is one of the more popular, well known and comparatively well trafficked sites.

Legend

In each of the following graphs, the ISP data being used is represented by "ISP A, ISP B, ISP C, ISP D and ISP E".
ISPs A through D are all paying, currently active advertisers. ISP E is using the free listing and is one of the more popular free-listing ISPs on CanadianISP.

To give you a rough idea of the costs of these ISPs' advertising, the following is a rough approximation of each of their budgets:

1. ISP A: ~ $5,000 / year
2. ISP B: ~ $3,400 / year
3. ISP C: ~ $10,000 / year
4. ISP D: ~ $6,000 /year
5. ISP E: $0.00 / year (Free listing)

How Traffic is Generated

Visitors to CanadianISP come from many, many sources. Naturally, a great many from search engines, such as Google and Bing; CanadianISP is linked from thousands of websites around the world, from personal pages, to government of all levels pages to regular news stories in radio, television, print and Internet.
In 2016, CanadianISP had 409,047 unique visitors, making a total of 564,891 visits, during which they viewed 1,548,432 pages on the site. That is an average of 3 pages per visit, which means visitors to CanadianISP are definitely engaged and interact with the site.
In this same time period, these visitors viewed individual ISP profile pages 490,650 times and clicked through to ISP websites 218,995 times. At an average of $30/month for residential ISP service, this represents $6,569,850 per month or $78,838,200 per year of business being routed around the country; This is a low estimate, as it does not take into account higher tier services and costs, hardware sales & rentals, multiple accounts or the much higher value business services.

Compared to Other Advertising

• CanadianISP, in our entire history, has always believed in up-front, predictable costs; We do not to cost-per-impression, cost-per-acquisition or cost-per-click. Advertisers with CanadianISP see their promotions running in rotation with a very limited number of other advertisers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
  You do not get interim bills for extra costs or overages, nor do you ads stop because they have reached a pre-determined number of exposures or clicks.
• You can change your ads at no cost, with no limitation on frequency. If you are runnning a year-long banner campaign, but wish to change them up for a weekend or a summer sale: There is zero cost to change your ads for a specified time period and then to revert back to your regular campaign upon completion of your promotional event.
• One of the most frequent comments we receive from advertisers is that not only is CanadianISP one of the lowest cost advertising venues, but we are the singularly lowest cost-per-acquistion form of advertising for Internet Service Providers. The reason for this is simple: CanadianISP.ca is focused on helping Canadians find an ISP. We do not do chat boards, we do not offer hardware reviews, we do not have video game previews:
  CanadianISP is about ISPs. Period.
  A visitor to CanadianISP is already in the mindset of looking for a new ISP. The same cannot be said of most other social media platforms or search engines.

Actual Costs of Advertising

You can get an initial view of costs here, at canadianisp.ca/cgi-bin/services_quote.cgi
It is important to point out a few items where your costs will be lower:

1. If you have never advertised with us, you will get a fifty percent discount on any and all services up to six months. We are that confident in the positive results of advertising on CanadianISP that we'll give you literally half-off, so that you may see for yourself at a much lower fiscal expense.
2. In addition to the 5% multiple products discount, CanadianISP has always offered an additional "package discount" for three or more services. There is no great rocket science to this - It is usually rounding down to the nearest $250, $500 or $1000 mark, depending on the size of the contract. For particularly extensive campaigns, our discounts tend to be more generous, especially when paid for the year up front.
3. Payment terms: While we, just like you, would prefer to see payment for the year up front (and we discount generously, when this is offered), we have been flexible in offering monthly or quarterly payment options.
4. Electronic payment discount: When you pay via EFT or Interac by email, you receive an additional 1% convenience discount.

While it is easier to say "more is better" (simply because, more often than not, this is true), the honest truth is that you will see *significant* benefits and increases in click-through traffic for $5,000 per year. As an example, a $5,000 annual budget will give your ISP a ranked listing below #10, Text Below ISP and the best available ISPSpotlight ranking on the front page of CanadianISP.ca. Once again: These benefits are twenty four hours a day, seven days a week (rank, text below ISP and ISPSpotlight involve no rotations, either: They are permanent modifications to your rank and ISP display, for the length of your contract). With quarterly payments, including HST, that is $1,412.50 every three months; You simply cannot get that exposure in any publication that exposes you to ~500,000 people per year who are actively looking for the services you provide.

To explore the options that best fit your ISP, get in touch with us and we will make it happen.

Views

A "view" is defined as a visitor to CanadianISP viewing an ISPs' profile page within the site - Most often after performing a search for ISPs and clicking on the company name from the search results list.

Clickthroughs

A "clickthrough" is defined as a visitor to CanadianISP clicking on the ISPs company name (or banner ad) and going directly to their site, thus leaving CanadianISP's website for the ISPs' website.

ISPSpotlight Views

A "spotlight view" is defined as a visitor to CanadianISP who clicks on an ISPs' company name from the list of 30 ISPs randomly displayed on the front page and going to the ISPs' profile page, within CanadianISP.