Direct Advertising
The great thing about response advertising is that you can tell if it is working or not. The type of response will vary from media to media. The idea behind this type of marketing is that you want customers to do one of 3 things.
- Buy a product
- Register for an account to enable you to market to
- Supply contact details in return for a free product
All of these will give you a similar result, the customer details. Your customer may not buy the first time they visit your site, so you want to entice them to give their details to enable you to get them back to buy your product at a later date. Offering customers the incentive of a £5 voucher if they register with you, or send them a free guide relevant to your products or industry to get them to leave their details. There are many different eBooks and tools which you can offer at zero cost.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Advertisers bid on "keywords" that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword "red widgets", hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.
While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006. In the spring of 2006, MSN started beta testing their own in-house service, MSN adCenter. In recent years agencies have also arisen to facilitate the use of pay-per-click advertising, such as Latitude White in the UK, leading to refinements in the PPC keywords-matching system. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although recently Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.
Pay per click advertising can be expensive but can also be very cost affective.
Testing and measuring
Results is the key to any advertising, if it does not give you results then change it. But do give it time to give you the true statistics. Running an advert once in a newspaper is not going to give you true results. Running a Pay Per Click advert for 1 day will not give you true statistics. When setting up an advert run it at least 3 times to give you some statistics to work on. If you do not get a response to an advert change it or stop it, DO NOT waste your money.
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