Internet advertising is a very broad term which encompasses hundreds of different methods, all designed to get you traffic and customers. In this article, we will walk you through the basic of internet advertising.
First and Foremost, Do Your Homework:
Before you start advertising, you need to first figure out who you are advertising to and what they are looking for. The more specific details you can get, the more effective your advertising will be, hence you will need to put in quite a bit of thought and research into this.
Where can you find what people are looking for, you may ask? One of the easiest ways is to do some keyword research. You can use many of the free keyword research tools online to find out what people in your business area are typing into the search engines. You can then use these keywords in many of your online marketing and advertisements.
You can then go about planning your own internet advertising campaign,or you can choose an agency to do it for you. If you decide to pay an agency, do some research on which one fits your needs best first.
Also, it’s better if you can find someone who will actually explain their methods to you– not a company that just takes care of it all for you. This is how you can start learning to make your ads more effective as well.
Types of Internet Ads
PPC Ads
PPC ads are one form of paid online advertising and the most popular. These are the ads that
you see on the right-hand side of your computer screen when you click a term in your search engine browser.
The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN, but there are hundreds more out there. With PPC advertising, you create an advertisement based on keywords that people are searching for on the internet. You then pay the search engine each time someone clicks on your advertisement.
Website/ Paid Classified Ads
Many business websites grant you the possibility to advertise on their sites. Prices here will vary.
Ezine Ads
With ezine advertising, you place your ads in an ezine that fits your target market. The prices of these ads depend on size and quality of the ezine subscriber list.
Free Ads
Advertising on the internet does not necessarily have to involve money. Social networking sites,
forums that are relevant to your business as well as products/services and article marketing are cost-free ways to advertise on the internet.
Tricks To Effective Internet Advertising
1. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. They probably receive pages and pages of spam every day. If you are sending out email advertisements, you need to figure out a way to distinguish yourself from the rest of the hype.
One easy way to do this is to not be “hypey” yourself. Create and ad that is informational and problemsolving, rather than one that is all about buy, buy, buy.
2. Pay Close Attention To Your Headline
The headline of your ad, whether it’s a banner, a PPC ad or email ad, is extremely important. Your audience will make a decision on whether they want to continue or not based on your headline so it must be compelling.
Ask a controversial question or provide shocking information. Those work well. But it should all tie into the benefits your audience will receive from your products/services. Your headline should also be keyword optimized. Research what keywords you want to be targeting with any of the free keyword research tools.
3. No Room For Error:
Effective internet advertising is professionally written and designed. Make sure you don’t have any grammatical or spelling errors, don’t use too many colors or fonts and try to use some “proven effective” shades as well.
4. Call To Action:
Remember that your ad must have a “call to action”. Many advertisers forget this important step. After you’ve peaked your target audience’s curiosity and sold them on your benefits, you need to tell them what to do.
Show them where to click so that they will be directed back to your website or wherever it is that you want to lead them. Always have a way for the reader to get in contact with you. Don’t make them search for it.
5. Incorporate Opt-In Form
Incorporate an opt-in form to your advertisement. This is where your reader will fill in his/her details. Offering a free trial or free informational guide are some ways to get your reader to fill out the opt-in contact information.
Don’t make him/her fill in too much information. The more they are required to put in, the more they are likely to just not enter in their information.
6. Give It A Personal Touch
The response you get is also enhanced with your personal touch. If you can follow up by making a phone call to each of the new members on your customer lead list, you are miles ahead of the game in terms of establishing your trustworthiness and credibility.
7. Stay Up To Date
Finally, keep yourself in tune with what the market is offering in terms of effective internet advertising–new and innovative technologies are constantly being developed.
How to Measure Internet Advertising Effectiveness:
One common question that many business owners share deals with how to evaluate their internet advertising effectiveness. Up until fairly recently, it wasn’t too easy to track how well your online ads were doing, not to mention anything about trying to figure out offline advertising
results.
However, the online techniques have really changed. It’s getting easier and easier to track the progress of your internet marketing advertising and most sites will at least give you the chance to see how many impressions your ad has received and how many people have actually clicked on it.
If you are using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, the search engines will provide you with relatively sophisticated tracking systems, making it very easy to see which ads are being clicked on and which ones aren’t.
More importantly, it shows you which ads are actually converting. Traffic without conversions won’t do you much good. If you are doing online marketing advertising elsewhere, you can implement your own tracking methods by assigning different values to each of the sites in which your ads are appearing.
This way, when and if a customer clicks on your ad, they won’t only be directed to your site but you can then see how they got to your site in the first place. This data can be seen in your web site’s log files, if you are creating redirects, through reports generated by a link program or within your auto responders, depending on your methods.
One extremely simple way to measure internet advertising effectiveness is to add an unsophisticated referral box right in your site’s shopping cart. Here you can just ask anyone who is making a purchase to answer how they found your site before they complete their order.
Many webmasters create a dropdown list which customers can choose from to make the process go by quickly. However, not everyone will enter in the correct information so the data will not be completely reliable.
How do you analyze the information that you’re getting from your tracking methods? If you see that the ratio of impressions to clicks is very low, you’ll at least need to consider making some changes to your ad campaigns.
Keep in mind that your ad needs to connect with your target audience and compel them to want to find out more. If you are getting a good amount of clicks, but they aren’t converting, it could mean that your ad didn’t reflect what you are promoting very well.
If you have just started advertising online, make sure to start small and test the waters first. You don’t want to spend a great deal of time and money on an extensive campaign that isn’t bringing in results.
Take small steps and learn with each one. Another good idea is to do split testing. For each products or service, create two ads and track which one does better. . .another part of the learning curve.
Measuring your internet advertising effectiveness should be done continually in order to improve and refine your internet advertising methods.
