Can online advertising be made simple?

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Can online advertising be made simple?

The opportunity from online advertising is clear – 18.3 million households in the UK last year with internet access, a new high of 70%, with 63% having broadband connections. In the last ten years online advertising has grown from £153 million to a staggering £3.54 billion (2009).

For a start up business or SME, without the knowledge and understanding of online advertising and the complexities of optimisation, taking the leap can be a daunting prospect.

First, there is the decision of running campaigns direct or via an agency.

Going direct will almost certainly require appointing an online marketer. Without it you could be spending thousands and literally getting zero new business back.

Appoint an agency and although you benefit from instant activity and no staff recruitment, you now face contracts, minimum terms, agency fees and minimum spends per month, not to mention limited transparency of how your campaign is performing on a daily basis.

Next you need to decide where you want to advertise, on Google for example, or across a network.

Finally and this is ever so important for effective online advertising, you need to ensure your ads are well targeted. There is obviously a list of ingredients that go to make up a strong and potentially successful campaign, but targeting is at the top. You need to find a network which uses targeting effectively enough, so that when you run pay per click campaigns you are only paying for relevant and highly profitable traffic.

Behavioural targeting ensures your adverts are only shown on sites based on the sites previously visited by the user. In other words, targeting users that are searching the web for the services like yours or closely related (or even services that from previous correlation data show a high propensity to then convert on the services you offer). Yield targeting looks at optimising on sites giving the greatest conversion, and contextual places ads on sites with related content.

Then you need to ensure you have full control over spend, can stop at any time, and can see clearly from reports at any time how your campaigns are performing. Ideally pay per click payments, with no penalty to stop campaigns, and easy to understand reports.

You also need to do some research on the internet to understand some of the key terms, including Click Through Rate, Conversion Rate, Quality Score (for Google), the pros and cons of paying by impressions or clicks, AB testing of different ad styles, and how to set up conversion tracking on the sign up page you need visitors to complete.

Lastly but by no means least, you need to ensure your site and in particular your landing pages for the ads and the sign up page is fully optimised, and you will need to add Google Analytics tracking code to your pages and analyse user behaviour through your site and where you are getting bounces.

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