How to advertise your business online
Online adverts are cost effective, highly measurable and can
give you national and international coverage. The online choices
now extend way beyond banner ads and include search engines, online
directories and even advertising on social networks, such as
Facebook. This guide outlines the main choices available and looks
at how to measure their success.
- Display advertising
- Online directories
- Search engines
- Measuring success
1) Display advertising
The traditional form of online ad is a banner on a relevant third
party website, but we've seen an explosion of formats over the last
few years including expandables, transitions, superstitials,
drop-downs and page peels. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)
has a
useful guide to these formats.
If you're smart, this kind of advertising can be done on a contra
basis - if you allow a business to advertise on your site, they in
turn will allow you to advertise on theirs. On the downside, users
have become overfamiliar with banner ads and the click through
rates can be very low.
- Target sites you'd like to carry your ads and suggest a contra
deal
2) Online directories
Paying for an online entry in a directory such as Yell .com and
ThomsonLocal.com could be a smart move and these are often offered
in conjunction with an entry in the printed version of the
directory. Your details will come up if your sector, location
or company name is searched for. The price of the ad varies
according to its position on the search results and its size, but
prices start at around under £100 per year.
- Investigate the online directories and get details of their
traffic figures
3) Search engines
Search engines are the fastest growing form of online advertising,
driven largely by Google's Adwords. Companies bid to be associated
with keywords that are used in searches. You can also take
advantage of local and regional targeting so that your ads
only appear to people searching in a particular region. You only
pay the search engine when a user clicks on your link. The trick
here is to choose the right key phrases to bid for. The wrong words
will attract visitors to your site who have no interest in your
product or service, this is doubly annoying as you're paying for
each visit. You also need to focus on taking your visitors to
the right page on your website, this might not be your home page
take them directly to the page that's most relevant to the keyword
they searched for.
- Compare the prices and traffic figures of the big search
engines such as Google and Yahoo
- Take customers to the right page on your site
4) Measuring success
For display ads the most common form of trading currency is the
cost per thousand ad impressions (CPM). However the pay per
click model is rapidly gaining pace and this is the system used by
Google Adwords. Here you pay every time a user clicks on your
advert. This can be a great way to generate new business, but it
needs to be well managed to make sure you're getting the right
customers. You can outsource the running of PPC campaigns, most
suppliers charge a fee based on a percentage of your spend. A third
model is the cost per acquisition (CPA). An acquisition can take
many forms and can include user registration, a request for a
brochure or the purchase of a product. This is the most cost
effective of all the metrics.
- Investigate which metric works best for your business
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