Paid Advertising

Most businesses need to spend money on advertising at some point.
Our approach is to make sure client's maximise the benefit.

Online Advertising methods

Online "advertising" comes in different forms, with a large number of options and variations.

Using search engines to create ads
Social networking sites offer paid advertising
Advertising on video sharing sites with text ads, or video adverts
Display advertising on news and features sites.
Discount voucher schemes (Groupon being the best known).

advertising should divert & convert

The principles of payment are similar across the board:

you pay when your ad is clicked
you pay by number of impressions (specifically cost per 1000 impressions, known as "cpm").
for a discount site you pay a percentage of the sales value.

We make this work by developing some serious thought around it:

It is an advertising campaign so has to be taken seriously. This means money and time invested to make a return.
It is better if you have something to offer. Just using it for the sake of attracting visitors to your website never feels sufficient. And you often have poor follow up figures.
Using it to make marketing tests can lead to improved results. This is either by expanding the campaign or introducing complementary advertising and promotional techniques based on the test results.

What we do

Good process combines the elements required to market effectively whereby what you spend produces incremental results.
Specific and a good deal - differentiate between the purpose of the campaign:

advertising, where you are promoting your business
marketing, where you have a specific offer for the customer

We look at:

Clear objectives of what you want to achieve
The product you want to sell
What the online competition is doing
The relevant keywords
Creating the advertising copy
Adjusting the website as appropriate
Setting up the campaign(s)
Identifying the budget required
Managing the campaign(s)
Collecting relevant data
Reporting on the results

competition for popular terms
is intense and expensive

Some clarification on sponsored online ads

Paying for advertising on the web has one common feature. You pay by a pre-determined result. Not for space or upfront which is the traditional method of Newspapers, Yellow Pages, T.V and Radio. There you are paying for space. Online, you pay for visibility where the basis is:

Cost per Impression, which is paying when your ad appears
Cost per click, where you are charged because someone literally clicks on your ad.
Cost per view, paying for video ads (as you have on YouTube)

Part of the "knowledge" is understanding which type ads to use and in which circumstances. The biggest factor is knowing how much to spend as this type of advertising is based on a bidding process. And just to complicate things further the highest bid does not necessarily get the highest ranking. Google ranks on the basis of "qualitative" factors to ensure that ads fulfil its mantra of relevance.

The key places to advertise are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. However to generate income this style has also been available on Social Networking sites for several years, primarily Facebook and Twitter.

Overall - online advertising is a great system. You can target a specific audience, its geography and demographics. And it is cost effective. You are only paying for a selected criteria which enables you to monitor and measure performance every few hours.

Main types of ad

Text ads
Image ads
Banner advertising
Pop-ups
Video ads (as banner but seen only on videos)