Web Advertising

To get optimum results from a web site, it is imperative that advertising and pay per click become part of a complete web marketing strategy. An established, fully functioning web site is necessary before advertising or pay per click options can be considered.

Buying web traffic equates to a specific set of business decisions which can be grouped into four categories:

• Banners
• Pay Per Click
• Paid Inclusion
• E-mail Lists

A banner is a web advertising unit that appears on appropriate web sites related to the product or service. Pop-up advertisements, or ads that display in a new browser window, are another form of advertising. It is important to define the marketing objectives of an advertising campaign in great detail in order to pinpoint the best sites on which advertisements should be placed. Target audiences should be identified by age, gender, income bracket, interests, and so forth. Banners should be placed on those sites whose visitors fit the targeted demographics. It is also very beneficial to consider banner ad exchanges, where a collection of related websites, or networks, swap banner ads with each other.

Pay per click is another form of paid online advertising, based solely on the number of people who click on a particular web site advertised at the top of search-engine listings. This form of advertising allows a company to buy its way to the top of search-engine listings. The payment model is based per click, meaning the company is paying a fixed rate, competitive to the surrounding positions, every time a visitor clicks on the particular site. This is very valuable, given that web site traffic is inevitably increased with higher positioning. Search-engine optimization and pay per click advertising should work symbiotically to reach targeted audiences and achieve the best results.

Purchased e-mail lists can also be very valuable in web advertising. Cheap, easy to attain e-mail lists are not the goal here; they are often useless, inappropriate, and could lead to site banning. Purchased e-mail lists that are reputable and specific to the market objectives are often too costly for smaller businesses, but if it is within the budget, it is worth the buck.

A great advantage of web marketing advertising over other forms of advertising is that it is instantaneous and easy to measure. Advertising costs can quickly add up, but there is ability to gage success online by using web metrics. A web site needs to have good analytics, meaning the ability to measure how many visitors reach a desired site and knowing where they came from, or from which advertisement. To determine a budget for advertising costs, a company needs to calculate the average profit margin on the average sale. Then a decision can be reached as to how much the company is willing to pay for each customer. Unlocking these types of ratios allow for solid business decisions. For example, for every 100 people who saw a banner, how many people clicked on it? This is called the click-through rate. There are good deals and there are bad deals for advertising placements. Web metrics will steer an advertising campaign from improperly executed placements. To build web metrics it is good to start small and test market.