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Archive for Advertising
Jan
11
The Importance of Internet Advertising
Posted by: | CommentsSo you’ve developed your product or selected your affiliate program, set up your website and you’re poised to start raking in the money. Now what? No one will know that your site exists if you don’t do some internet advertising. You must get your name out there in front of the masses and direct their interest toward your site.
Internet advertising is not restricted to online businesses. Many brick and mortar businesses are spending more advertising dollars online than in other media. A recent article in Business Week states by the year 2008, internet advertising dollars will overtake the money spent on radio advertising. Newspapers and other print advertisers are also feeling the pinch and even television will not be immune to the loss of revenue as more advertising budgets are spent online.
So what does this mean to the online entrepreneur? For one thing, it serves to illustrate the value of Internet advertising, and gives fair warning that advertising online will become even more competitive in the next few years as more offline businesses bring their ads online. For online businesses, internet advertising is imperative for survival.
There’s much variety in the methods available for advertising your product or website and the cost ranges from free to whatever amount your budget will allow. The web offers free classifieds as well as paid versions. You can choose to advertise on other sites using banners or text ads. Many have found great success with pay-per-click advertising. And of course, word of mouth continues to be one of the most effective methods, online or off.
How do you determine the best method for your product? Experts will tell you the only way to find out what works best is through testing, re-testing, and more testing of every ad you produce. Fortunately, internet advertising makes testing of ads relatively simple. Ads can be changed immediately with a click of the mouse. There’s software available to help you determine exactly which ads are pulling the most traffic and sales to your site. Results can be seen very quickly and ads can be reformatted according to those results.
It doesn’t matter that you have the greatest product ever created if it doesn’t get into the hands of the consumer. The fact that your website was professionally designed and contains an enormous amount of valuable information ceases to be important if no one ever finds their way to it. The best way to accomplish this is through internet advertising.
It’s vitally important to the growth of your business that you educate yourself on advertising methods available. Talk to others about the ads they’ve used and which ones they find most beneficial. Seek out experts for their advice. Apply what you’ve learned, track your ad results and test other versions. Tweak your headlines, add or remove audio or video, or rearrange the format until your ad results show you a winning combination.
Internet advertising is a powerful marketing tool that will enhance and help you build your business, on or offline. But for online entrepreneurs, how well you learn how to apply the techniques of internet advertising can make the difference between phenomonal success and a business that fades into cyberspace.
Learn how to get the biggest bang for your advertising buck! Stop trying to do it by yourself!
Jan
11
Online Advertising Through 2008: Paid Search Drives Modest Recovery
Posted by: | CommentsOnline Advertising Through 2008: Paid Search Drives Modest Recovery
Jan
11
IS there a difference between ADVERTISING and MARKETING?
Posted by: | CommentsIn college I want to major in graphic design and minor in advertising. One of the colleges I’m really interested in has marketing but not advertising. Are these the same things? Please help me out here!!!! THANKS!
Jan
11
Does anyone have any advice for advertising a small business company?
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Hello, I have started my own wedding planning business. I am seeking ways to advertise my business to the appropriate market. However, I would like to spend little money on the advertising to start with. All ideas and suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Jan
10
Advertising and marketing major or culinary school?
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I really want to go to culinary school for pastry and baking but I don’t have the means to get a loan for the school bc the only lender the offer is Sallie Mae and I tried 4 different cosigners and got denied even with a cosigner with perfect credit. Should I go to school for marketing and advertising and than pursue my culinary career after I have an established career?
Jan
10
Effective Advertising Through Closing.doc
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Advertising can be done effectively in different ways. Effective advertising can uplift companies
Promo Codes easily and the products can be reached thoroughly to the customers and this improvises the companies development in a very well manner.
Get out all the ads you ran last year. Go ahead. Tear them out of your magazines or newspapers (if you’re lucky enough to have proof sheets, so much the better). Tear out your competitor’s ads too—as many as you can get your hands on. Next, fold the company names, addresses and logos out of view. If the company names are in the headlines block them off with paper and tape. Now tape them up to the wall, putting yours on top, your competitors’ below. Now back off, at least five feet. We’re going to gradually close in on the most effective ad in the group (hopefully one of yours).
Next come an equally important aspect: consistency. All your ads should project the same image. No, they don’t have to have the same visual or the same headline. They should, however, look like they all come from the same company. After all, this image is your “familiar face” in the crowd. It’s also something you worked very hard to create. And it’s uniquely yours, no one else’s. Just like a good salesperson that finally got in the door to make that first sale. You wouldn’t dream of switching salespeople after that. If your ads look like they came from several different companies, your audience might assume your product does. If your ads pass this test, effective advertising is within your reach. Which is exactly where you need to be for the next step?
An arm’s length away from your favorite campaign of ads. The object of this test is to see how well you’ve positioned yourself. Yes, you can now read your ads, but not for details. How you position yourself should be fairly evident by the time you finish the first paragraph. Positioning is basically how your audience perceives your product, service or company. For example, businessmen, engineers and students all need computers, yet each has a different idea of what computers can do for them. Advertise a computer to a businessman and you might do better to position it a management or accounting tool. Students might respond better to an ad showing computers as a writing and study aid. And engineers would be better persuaded to buy a computer if you positioned it as a design or research tool. In each case, the products Promo Codesare the same but the positioning generates the unique appeal for any given market. And, the greater the appeal, the greater the sales. If you’ve done your research, your positioning should bring the reader a little closer to your ad and your product.
For this, you’ll have to get in close to the bottom of your ad. Close enough to read your call to action, which should be short and direct, leaving no doubt in the reader’s mind what to do after reading the ad—call, clip a coupon, circle a bingo card. It should also be clear as to what the reader can expect to receive—more information, arrange a demo, have a salesperson call, and get a trial sample. The reader shouldn’t have to get too close to read this either (don’t put this or your phone number in fine print). Remember, when a salesperson asks for the order or gives his or her phone number, it’s always loud and confident, never a whisper.
There are obviously many markets, demographic and personal factors we haven’t considered. But if you meet the key objectives we’ve introduced, your audience can’t help but close in on your ad—and your product. And that’s what effective advertising is all about.
Jan
09
Google Paid Advertising Review Part I
Posted by: | CommentsSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) – What is it?
With the recent ‘Florida’ update on google & its impact on the SERPs, typically on the commercial search phrases, it has become imperative that we now examine paid advertising scenario at google. For scores of merchants, now paid advertising will be the only way to help them salvage their holiday sales, as also future revenues. This will be a two parts article, with the first part focusing on the google paid advertising space & the second part on the best practices thereof. However, before we start on googles adwords & adsense programs a word or two on online advertising industry performance in 2003.
Online Advertising Industry:
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the online advertising industry sales have been robust this year with three consecutive quarters of growth witnessed for the first time in last two years. Lets first look at the yearly sales figures for last three years. Online advertising climaxed in 2000 with $8 billion in revenue (dot com boom) before declining to $7.1 billion in 2001, and $6 billion in 2002. This year in the first three quarters, the sales have been estimated at a healthy 5.07 billion (up 13% from the same period last year). The break up of the quarterly sales figure is as under:
- The first quarter sales have been at 1.63BUSD
- Second quarter is pegged to have clocked 1.69 billion (up 14% from same quarter last year)
- Third quarter is estimated to have done 1.75billion.( 20% growth from this quarter last year)
According to IAB, out of the 6bUSD figure of 2002, 15.4% (or roughly 1 billion) can be attributed to Search term related sales. This is up 200% from the figures of 2001.
The contribution of search term related ads has been estimated to 31% of the second quarter figures. No break up for third quarter figures is however available. Financial firm Salomon Smith Barney expects the estimated $1.4 billion market in 2003, to grow 30 percent to 35 percent per year, reaching $5 billion by 2008.
This Advertising space is dominated by two major players (obviously): Google & Overture.
Google Adwords
Google has two services for its paid advertisers. Adwords & Adsense. Lets start with Adwords.
This is a program run by Google in which it lets the advertisers bid for a chunk of the real estate on the search engine results page related to specific queries. The ads appear as “sponsored listings/premium listings” next to the organic search results. Along with getting exposure at the googles own site¸ these ads are also syndicated at Google’s partner sites like: America Online, Inc.,Ask Jeeves ,AT&T Worldnet ,CompuServe ,EarthLink, Inc. ,Netscape ,Sympatico Inc. etc.
Currently, Google is supposed to have approx 150,000 monthly advertisers for its paid placement services.
Adwords Account Statistics:
Following are the statistics for every adword account google has; One can set up 25 campaigns in every account. Each campaign can have up to 100 adgroups in it; with each adgroup capable of having up to 750 Keywords in it. The overall limit on any account is 2000 keywords.
Adwords offers four kinds of Keyphrse matching namely: Broad, Phrase,Exact & Negative. Recently, Google has introduced expanded matching for its broad matches. More on this later.
It lets you target your ads to specifically 14 languages, 250 countries or 200 states /regions in US. Google claims 99% accuracy for its IP tracking system to deliver the ad effectively to the target audience.
Recent Features on Adwords:
Google has added three new features to its adwords campaign in October. Those are:
Conversion Tracking Expanded Matching Increased Click Through Threshold.
Conversion Tracking:
Google has introduced a conversion tracking feature for its advertisers, wherein they can now track the conversions resulting from their advertisement traffic. This conversion tracking helps the advertisers by quantifying the ROI they are achieving with their campaigns.
This feature works by introducing a cookie on the user computer whenever someone clicks on an advertisement. This cookie is connected to the conversion page if the user reaches there. If it is matched, google records a successful conversion.
Expanded Matching:
As a part of its broad matching of keywords, Google has introduced a ’smart’ feature called expanded matching. With expanded matching, AdWords system automatically runs ads on highly relevant keywords, including synonyms, related phrases, misspellings and plurals, even if they aren’t in the original list of keywords that you submitted with google.
For example if your keyword is ’software development’, google system will try & guess alternate searches to display your ads on. Some examples are ’software solutions’ or ’software services’ or ‘technical solutions’. Over time, it will monitor the click through rates (CTR) for these searches & ‘learn’ the relevance of these searches for you. This will help it make expanded searches more specific. Also, based on its mining the search queries, it will be able to develop fresh combination of search terms which will be relevant to the business.
In an effort to let you know what are the keywords it will look to broaden your exposure to, google has for the first time put out a Adwords keyword suggestion tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
This tool highlights the googles view of what other terms, it ‘understands’ to be relating to your business. (Tip :This tool works well for broad searches.)
This theme based adwords tuning, is in sync with googles trend of trying to understand ‘available content’ & ‘user queries’ & make ‘intelligent matching’ of the two.
Increased Click Through Threshold
The increased click-through threshold is designed to help ads that may have struggled for traffic due to poor search relevance. These include those related to contextual ads as well.
Now for evaluating the Account performance evaluates each account after every 1,000 ad impressions. If the CTR for the account falls below a minimum required CTR (which varies by ad position, geography etc but is 0.5% for the top spot and slightly reduced for each subsequent position) the ads will only be displayed occasionally for under performing keywords.
Google Adsense:
Google AdSense is an offshoot of the Google Content-Targeted Advertising program that was launched in early March 2003.
This early program let large websites integrate Google AdWords into their websites. Each deal was independently negotiated with Google, and sites with less than 20 million page views couldn’t participate.
The Google AdSense program democratizes the content based text ad display process. Even small merchants,bloggers with only a few thousand page views per month, can now apply to the AdSense program.
The AdSense program allows Web publishers to apply for the program online. After Google vets a site for popularity and quality — a process the company estimates will take two to three days — accepted applicants download a string of HTML code to insert on Web pages on which they wish to carry text-link ads.
Google draws the listings from its base of 150,000 advertisers, using its algorithmic search technology to scan the content page and match it up with relevant links that are displayed as either skyscraper ads on the right side of the page or banners at the top.
Some of the large Googles partner networks are :HowStuffWorks, Mac Publishing (includes Macworld.com, MacCentral, JavaWorld, LinuxWorld ,New York Post Online Edition ,Reed Business Information (includes Variety.com and Manufacturing.net) ,U.S.News & World Report online.
All the rules that apply to adwords listings also apply to Adsense in respect of CTR, Positioning etc.
About Author Vikas Malhotra is a successful Internet marketing consultant having helped over 100 businesses increase their visibility and sales online. He is an online branding expert with experience in online media planning, buying and also search engine marketing. Visit the site: http://www.mosaic-service.com