The global market for the amount of money spent on online advertising is now
an amazing $40 billion per year. For website owners there is huge potential to
exploit this market to promote a product or service. For beginners to online
marketing, there are almost too many choices. One of the key questions is how
much should I spend and which what advertising strategy and platform should I
use?
The majority of online advertising is spent via search engines in a
pay-per-click form. Pay per click works on a bidding system for a particular
search phrase. When a potential prospects clicks on the webmasters advert, the
advertiser is only ever charged that bid amount. The bidding auction is a never
ending and never stops and so competition for popular search terms drives the
price naturally up to its market equilibrium. The threshold at which the price
will peak is based on the average return on investment for advertisers products
and services.
Pay Per Click adverts that are created by advertisers appear alongside normal
organic search results and are usually displayed as 'sponsored links'. When a
prospect uses a search engine and types in a particular keyphrase, the sponsored
links results may or may not appear alongside the normal organic results.
Advertisers can exclude whether their adverts appear in certain geographies (to
exclude clicks from target markets that are not interested in a localised
product or service). Conversely, advertisers may choose a broad match on their
keyphrase bis (within the PPC system) so that even if the prospect doesn't quite
search for that exact phrase, the webmasters advert may still be displayed. This
gives the advertiser a greater chance of potentially displaying the advert to
the prospect market resulting in more click troughs' and potential sales. Pay
per click adverts are also displayed on the search engines 'content partners'
network. These are websites that search engines have approved to display a per
click adverts via the search engines pay per click code.
Static paid inclusion is the simple ad hoc method of advertising. There are
literally thousands of websites offering advertising space too anyone who wants
to display the advertisment. Paid inclusion is less targeted as it does not
directly relate to a user's search term. If a website is strongly related to
your product or service it does provide a greater opportunity to access your
target market. Paid inclusion dates back to the 1990's to banner advertising.
Originally, banner advertising was widely used as a means of promoting products
or services. However, as users became more Internet savvy they became fed up
with irrelevant messages, and in your face colours and slow loading 'spinning
globes' type graphics. Hence, textual advertising (in the form of pay-per-click)
soon replaced graphical banner forms as the dominant advertising platform,
There are thousands of 'paid' directories of websites structured around
themes, the topics and vertical industries. Some provide extremely useful
methods of driving traffic through to your website. Other smaller les
established ones, have simply been set up as a 'link farm' for reciprocal link
generation or in an attempt to make money without providing much real value for
money to the paying advertiser.
Advertising in a blog or forum is a great way to get your product or website
noticed. By providing informative posts, opinion and educational articles
(without over promoting your site directly), users begin to trust your expertise
and will feel compelled to visit your website to find out more. This form of
advertising is usually free and involves your time and effort in thinking
through which forums are relevant and which articles may be of interest to your
prospect market.
