Online Advertising in a Nutshell
Internet is getting very important part in our lives, especially
in business. Successful business can't be imagined without
Internet presence. Many companies have their own corporate web
sites and email newsletters but it is not enough. Online
advertising is the next logical part of every integrated
marketing campaign in order to spread the word about your
company.
Online advertising is much more different than in early Internet
days, back in 1995. At the beginning of online advertising age
the most used banner formats were 468x60 pixels, 120x60 pixels
and 88x31 pixels. Several years ago new ad formats appeared like
so called skyscraper ads. We recommend you to visit Internet
Advertising Bureau to see universal ad packages.
http://www.iab.net/standards/adunits.asp
Online advertising spending grows exponentially. According to a
research made by eMarketer, in 2005. advertising spending in USA
will be more than $10 billion dollars for the first time. They
predict that it will reach $12.9 billion dollars! This is really
great especially if we know that in 2002. advertising was $6
billion dollars. Three years is not so long time, but when it
comes to the Internet it is.
There are many sites that have some ads. Usually they are
smaller or larger animated images called banners. Online
advertising is so oversaturated that many studies show that
people developed ability to screen out ads. The first banner was
published on HotWired web site in 1994. It is a famous banner
with text: "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? YOU
WILL!"
At the beginning banners had decent click-thru rates, sometimes
even 10%. Today, usually CTR is between 0.1-0.3% even lower
because of banner saturation.
Marketers needed new online advertising models so they started
making ads using Flash. Using Flash technology, marketers are
able to make interactive ads that look like mini home pages and
in most cases those ads have much better CTR. Ads made in Flash
can be seen on many popular portals like Yahoo! and MSN.
Today, the best results show email advertising and contextual
advertising. Email advertising is great if your ad appears in
double opt-in email newsletters with targeted subscribers. Good
ad campaigns can get 5-10% CTR in email newsletters, even higher
in some cases.
Google made a revolution in online advertising introducing the
contextual advertising models in their services AdWords and
AdSense. AdWords is based on a model that advertisers can choose
desired keywords so every time someone makes a search on Google
with their selected keyword their ad will appear on Google side
bar or on the top of search results. This is good because many
people don't see them like advertising, they see them as search
results, and therefore, CTR is higher. It is Pay Per Click (PPC)
advertising so that advertiser only pays when someone clicked on
their ad. AdSense, on the other hand, allows publishers that
they ads appear like texts only on relevant web sites that have
similar target audience like their business. Google AdSense is
great for web site owners, too, because they can monetize their
web site traffic. Recently, it became possible to have Google
ads in RSS. This is very useful for bloggers.
Another good choice for PPC advertising is using services like
Overture and AdBrite. Overture allows keyword bidding and many
popular sites like Yahoo! and MSN use Overture service for their
sponsored search results. AdBrite allows you to choose web sites
on which you want to advertise.
We have listed several useful free services that will help you
in making your next successful PPC campaign.
Google AdWords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox<
/a>
Keyword Suggestion Tool http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Free Search Engine Ranking & Keyword Tracker http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/"
Search Engine Placement Check http://www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm"
When you start with online advertising you have to be able to
give answers on several questions.
1) What do you want to achieve?
If you don't want where you are going, you will never get there.
You have to know what you want to achieve with your online
advertising campaign. It is like when you make projections in
your business plan. You will have to make your Internet
marketing plan. Your goals can be to get 100 clients, 2000
subscribers to your email newsletter or anything else. Just be
specific and clearly define your goals in order to achieve them.
2) Where to advertise?
This is the next logical step. Depending on what your goals are
you will choose your target sites. Do you want to use online
advertising for your branding? Then the good use can be larger
banner campaign on popular ad networks. It is most likely that
you won't have some great CTR but many people will see your ad
and it is cost-effective. If you want better response rate, good
thing is to advertise in email newsletters. If you want to get
clients with minimum risk you should use PPC advertising on
search engines or affiliate programs based on pay-per-sale. You
won't choose same places to advertise if you want to reach
newbies and decision makers. You have to know what you sell and
to whom. Market segmentation is essential.
You have to choose quality and visited web sites. We have listed
several useful free services that can help you to determine site
popularity.
Google Page Rank Prediction http://www.rustybrick.com/pagerank-prediction.php
Alexa http://www.alexa.com
Link Popularity Check http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm<
/a>
3)Out Of The Box approach Don't be scared to experiment
with your ads. We have already said that there are many ads, so
you will have many competitors. You want to get the most from
your advertising dollars. Test, test, test! Be creative and use
technologies like Flash or DHTML in order to make your ads stand
out from the crowd.
4) Words sell
You have to choose good message for your ads. To clearly define
your offer and to call on action. Don't forget to include words
like "Click here", "Register Now!", and "Free Report", to offer
contests for popular gadgets like iPod. Good thing is to include
interesting questions in your ads, questions that start with
"How To..." messages that start with numbers like "7 Email
Marketing Best Practices"...
Things to avoid
Although, some people can tell you that pop-ups can bring you
many new subscribers, we recommend you not to use pop-ups.
Different studies show that people don't like this technique.
Don't make your banner images bulky, it will have a slow loading
time. Not everyone use broadband. Optimize them to have good
loading time. Some people make their banners look like Windows
dialogue boxes or place a combo box image on their banners in
order to mislead their visitors and to have better CTR. Don't
use that technique.