T H E O F F I C I A L M A K E I T H A P P E N G U I D E T O. Paid advertising on the internet

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1 T H E O F F I C I A L M A K E I T H A P P E N G U I D E T O Paid advertising on the internet

2 Paid advertising on the internet > It is a traffic source of potential customers which you have to pay for. Unlike natural search engine optimization or social media traffic sources which, depending on your level of understanding, can be obtained freely. Many types of paid for advertising exist, on the internet. Ranging from sponsorship of whole sites, to Pay per click advertising in search engines, to banner ads, which themselves can come a variety of formats: Floating ads: An ad which moves across the user's screen or floats above the content. Which can be used to great effect in You tube advertising. Expanding ads: An ad which changes size and which may alter the contents of the webpage. These we can see more and more in mobile advertising. Trick banners: A banner ad that looks like a dialog box with buttons. Often used in conjunction with a special prize or announcement about viruses to get people to click on the advert. Also now entices people in with gaming aim and click methodologies. Pop-ups: A new window which opens in front of the current one, displaying an advertisement, or entire webpage. Not usually used. Pop-unders: Where the window is loaded or sent behind the current window so that the user does not see it until they close one or more active windows. Video ads: similar to a banner ad, except that instead of a static or animated image, actual moving video clips are displayed. This is happening more and more especially in certain adult industries. Map ads: text or graphics linked from, and appearing in or over, a location on an electronic map. This will also happen more and more as we move into augmented geo locational advertising. Internal ads: advertising inside the or newsletter in the form of banners or hyperlinks. This can be very useful and effective if the publisher of the content has a relationship with the receiver of the and you are in complementary industries. > What are the benefits to you? Traffic is the blood of businesses and web content on the internet. Without visitors your idea will simply die. Your website needs traffic. It needs people going to it. Paying for traffic is a wise move if search engine optimization is taking too long to bear fruit and social media is providing traffic but not of the type you need i.e. people who might buy. Also potential customers traditionally tend to be very difficult to get from offline advertising to online sites, so getting ranked high on the search engines (SEO) or CPC cost per click or PPC pay per click is a way of getting more traffic. > Each PPC methodology is different due to the difference in where and how the potential customer encounters your advertising message. In essence, it is the context which changes the exchange i.e. where they meet you potentially makes a difference to what they think about you. So the person who is searching in Google is 2

3 fundamentally different (as a potential customer) to the one who is using Facebook. How is the person who sees your advert in LinkedIn at work going to react compared to the person who sees it placed over a funny in a viral campaign in / on YouTube on their mobile phone? No matter which method you use, if you get 1000 people coming to your your site that a) Aren t your demographic. i.e. they are 80 year old grandmothers when you are selling gym kits. Or, b) Are your demographic just at the wrong time? i.e. they are interested in searching and finding out more etc but not buying. Then is there any point in paying for them? Also remember, if your website design then makes them leave your site (or bounce) then what was the point of paying for them in the first place? C P M ( C O S T P E R M I L L E I. E. P E R ) It s where you pay for exposure of your message to a specific audience. Key benefit: This method can be excellent for brand awareness in certain demographics. There is no guarantee on a return on investment as you are brand building with this device. C P V ( C O S T P E R V I E W ) It s when you can pay for each unique user view of an advertisement or website (usually used with pop-ups, pop-unders and interstitial ads). Key methods According to some Google owns around 69% of the online advertising market (as they also own Double Click and Admob) Remember that Google owns Adsense so most of the PPC advertising you see on small business websites and portals is Google owned. However, other search engines also have PPC. Yahoo is next with around 7% and Bing around 6% (but this changes as they take over different companies and work with other companies like Facebook). This is great for highly specialised and visually stimulating sites with very quick call to actions i.e. gambling sites. Again there is no guarantee on a return on investment as you hoping on instant action from a chosen demographic. 3

4 Key methods C P C ( C O S T P E R C L I C K ) It is also known as (PPC). You pay each time a user clicks on the search engine listing and the user is redirected to your website or landing page. Unlike SEO you can direct this manually i.e. you can have the visitor land precisely where you want them be that on your home page or at the point of sale. Different platforms for your PPC. G O O G L E A huge search engine with around 86% of the UK search traffic, Google, owns most of the paid for traffic on the net and works on quality score through keywords. These keywords also triggers into Google maps and other web traffic through placement advertising. The landing pages own meta data is a vital part of the reasoning behind how much the search engines charge you see relevancy and quality score. C P A ( C O S T P E R A C T I O N ) (Cost Per Acquisition) advertising is performance based and is common in affiliate marketing. Brings the highest numbers of clicks but is very much to do with the key phrases you create. Also the quality score affects the cost per click, as does the length of time you have advertised or how successful the single ad is. Using keywords inside the adverts helps and making sure your Meta data and keywords are on your landing page brings down the costs. In this payment scheme, the publisher takes all the risk of running the ad, and the advertiser pays only for the amount of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up. This is a relatively new and exciting method of online advertising. And as it is new it has its dangers with not being actively policed. Y A H O O A N D B I N G : These two separate search engines have really joined forces against Google. Their algorithm uses keywords to trigger the adverts. Has a lower cost per click than Google, due to the lack of competition inside the adverts, but still commands a decent number of visitors. Also you 4

5 have some working through with Ciao as well which is the marketing place for Bing. Tends to be good for business sales, as many businesses still use the Microsoft systems. And these brands are particularly strong in America traffic. Final thing you should be aware of is that Bing may / has joined forces with Facebook for a beta test of social searching. L I N K E D I N LinkedIn has over 80 million members and is growing at 1 per second. This web portal site is actually a replacement for the recruitment industry or a huge service provider under a clever guise of social networking for career minded individuals and companies. F A C E B O O K A huge web portal which redesigned / redefined web 2.0 and might well change the world. Facebook now has more than 500 million users and is still growing. Uses a whole host of information not only demographic information and what the user is interested in (filled out when they register) but also how many people like your advert. With this PPC you must realise that the potential customer is in a social space. The destination is vital to what happens next. To land people from a social experience into a buying one often has a very weak conversion rate. Using Facebook (targeting a key demographic) creates adverts like you would an advertising campaign in a magazine i.e. as a series of them. Its algorithm can be targeted to a sector and type of job, not keywords or phrases that the person inputs. LinkedIn s demographic is very highly sought after as they make 45K a year on average. Sometimes dubbed the Facebook for old people, the demographics own personality often reins in more adventurous advertising. Also the PPC is one of the highest in the industry due to the ROI. Y O U T U B E Youtube is a site which plays videos downloaded by the users. And around 24 hours of footage are uploaded every minute. It is owned by Google and is simple a whole new platform of potential. The system uses the choices of the viewer i.e. which video they would like to watch and therefore this contains keywords and meta data like adwords, as it is also owned by Google. 5

6 Millions of people are watching and interacting with the videos. And if created correctly videos and thus the adverts inside or around them can be seen by millions too. The benefit of PPC in Youtube is almost like owning your own ITV station it has this much potential. Key Terms Keywords: these are the words typed into a search engine or flagged up by a social network which triggers your advertising as with SEO. Yet the differences are profound in the real world. Your CTR changes depending on where in the timeline you place your advert not just on which video the PPC advert is. You are sometimes better to use the annotation function inside the videos themselves. Whilst the simple act of hijacking high traffic videos is not the best idea. A D M O B Admob is a advertising PPC platform which targets mobile phone users. As the platform is owned by Google it works on the same lines as Adwords / Google PPC with ads being triggered by keywords. You can get a huge number of clicks and choose the demographic and target well through a knowledge of the phone market i.e. who buys / uses what phone models. Key phrase: when more than one word is used, and many searches are like this, then it becomes a key phrase i.e. just a list of keywords. Key phrases however can make a huge difference in the buying circle and can show the psychology of the potential customer. Long tail: The extension of the key phrase was a realisation by Chris Andersen that many online advertising key phrases are very specific in the formation. i.e. 12 red roses in Manchester. Is different to just typing in Flowers. It is this long tail distribution (so called due to its graphic illustration) that allows PPC to be more precise and give a higher return on investment. Quality Score: Many systems for PPC i.e. Google AdWords will have a system that calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. A variety of factors are looked into measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. Closely related to its performance, its relevancy, and your landing pages own keywords. Targeting a younger, early adopter demographic is crucial to getting the best ROI you can. Whilst this can be increased massively if you have a mobile site to land the extra traffic in. Relevancy Score: Similar to Quality Score but surrounded by more myths as it continually changes depending on the social network provider you are using. This score is how much the site believes you advert is relevant to the discussion often based on interactions as well as keywords. 6

7 Landing page: This is the page where your advertisement directs your potential customer to. It doesn t have to be your homepage. In fact, some would argue that this would not be the most relevant place you could point your advert to. Often, systems allow you to hid the exact landing page URL from your customer. But it is rare that the display url and the destination url can be for different websites. CTR click through rate: This is quite simply the number of people who see your advert / over thenumber of people who click on your advert to go to your site. Many people get obsessed with click through rates but what is wise to remember is the more what you wanted that person to do when they reach your site. What is the cost per action? Rather than just the CTR of the advert. 7