CLAIBORNE’S CYBER-SPOTS
Byline: Valerie Seckler
NEW YORK — Amid the deafening roar of disbelievers in online ads, Seventh Avenue giant Liz Claiborne has decided to give them a whirl.
And with good reason. Claiborne has found it can’t expect shoppers to flock to its e-commerce destinations — in this case, Web sites for its Lucky Brand Dungarees and Elisabeth brands — simply because they’re there. For example, according to the Web ratings arm of Jupiter Media Metrix, in June, the Lucky Brand Web site drew 242,000 visitors, reaching 0.3 percent of Web users, while Elisabeth.com had fewer than 200,000. By Nielsen/NetRatings’ count, each Web site had about 100,000 visitors in June.
By comparison, JCPenney.com, credited as the Web’s biggest apparel merchant, lures more than 2 million shoppers per month, representing roughly 3 percent of Web users, while better-price catalogers like ColdwaterCreek.com and JCrew.com typically draw more than a half-million visitors a month, found JMM.
The Claiborne banner and button ads, placed with affiliate merchants that it has declined to name, are based on a pay-per-performance formula that calls for it to pay Web advertisers 7.5 percent of sales produced via Elisabeth ads and 15 percent of sales from the Lucky ads, plus an additional 30 percent of those fees to be paid to Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Commission Junction. Commission Junction, a pay-per-performance ad network, is serving the ads and tracking the clicks and purchases they produce for Claiborne. Besides the ads, there are text links that take users directly to promoted items on the Claiborne Web sites.
Although he declined to specify revenue produced by the ads since Claiborne quietly began the program back in February, Lex Sisney, Commission Junction’s chief executive officer, noted: “Our advertisers tend to realize 10 percent of their overall revenue from these ads.”