A guide to online advertising

Online advertising, for a new business or one used to traditional print ads, is a leap of faith and somewhat overwhelming. But the moment has arrived for all firms to consider online advertising to be an essential, if not the only method to reach customers. Print advertising, compared to online advertising (computers, tablets, and phones), is merely white noise. But, effective advertising through online channels requires designing and promoting well-designed ads, using specific keywords and placing them in distinct venues. Online advertising breaks into two separate categories: a. Display advertising b. Search engine marketing.

For display advertising, you could hire a marketing company to reach out to websites to design and market your display ad and manage your marketing. But you will soon find out that this is an expensive method to reach your clients, and perhaps more suited to large companies with somewhat unlimited ad budgets. So what is suited for small to medium size business?

Google Adwords' Display Network is part of Google Adwords universe. Study after study has proven that for a small to medium-size business Google Adwords is the most effective and the most cost-efficient method of advertising. So what is Google Adwords? Google AdWords is an online advertising service developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display brief advertising copy, product listings, and video content within the Google ad network to web users. Google AdWords' system is based partly on cookies and partly on keywords determined by advertisers.

So what is our role as your advertising company? As your marketing and advertising company, we start with copy based text ads. We research which keywords are most related to your kind of business, write ad copy that is most compatible and enticing and synchronize it all with the keywords utilized in your website to reach your customers in the most cost-efficient and compelling way possible. We will make sure that you are spending your ad budget wisely, and will measure the impact of your campaign, monthly, weekly and even daily.

And what does Google do for you? Google uses the keywords and the text ads that we provide to place advertising on pages where it is most relevant to your business. You as an advertiser pay when users divert their browsing and click on your advertisement (paid-per-click). Google displays your text ads at the top or bottom of pages it displays to people using its search engine (hence Search Engine Marketing), and in case of display ads, Google pays the partner websites a portion of the generated income that Google charges. As your marketing company, we make sure that your ad does not appear on websites that you do not want to be on, or when your advertising is not relevant to them.

Google AdWords' Google Display Network, offers over 2 million websites that your ad can appear on and manages the promotion of your ad could across mobile-based apps programs. If your AdWords text advertising has reached its max potential, which for a small business may be at least a few years away (or perhaps never!), we will apply Google Adwords display advertising to further your advertising reach and find new customers. The click-through rate on display ads, although growing hovers around 0.07%, making it a secondary option if one at all.

And what is remarketing or retargeting advertising: These ads appear when a user has already been to your website. Google remarketing uses cookies to track user's visit, and then your ad would appear on another website they visit, ideally causing the user to return to your website.

And how about mobile advertising? Your ads at first displayed on desktop computers and mobile users were a secondary consideration. According to recent market research, the situation is now entirely flipped, and over 70% of all display ads in the US are mobile; Meaning regardless of the audience you are trying to reach, you have to create ads primarily with mobile-viewing in mind.

Bing Advertising is another consideration. Bing Network, may not be as large as Google’s; Bing claims that it now reaches 46 million unique searchers who aren’t using Google. In practice, and although we test the Bing platform for new clients, we have not found overwhelming reasons to utilize the Bing network.

How do we measure the results of your advertising? We track your ad performance and consistently evaluate it against your marketing goals. Through the use of analytics platforms such as Google Analytics and Google's Webmaster tools, we measure how many new visitors you receive at your website. We also report on user's level of engagement such as the time they spent on your website, page views, and more, all to figure out how best to convert this traffic into paying customers.

Please check our blog for more on Google advertising, and if you have questions contact us with your questions.