Purchasing Online Advertising - An Overview

Are you the owner or marketing person at a small or medium sized business? Are you trying to figure out how to get started, or improve upon, your Internet marketing campaign? Getting started advertising online can be a seemingly daunting task given the non-tangible nature of Internet user traffic. Advertising in local online markets is even more difficult due the national and international nature of the Web.

A business will likely have many questions when getting started. Where do I find local online marketing opportunities? How much should I be spending for a given campaign? How should I be measuring the results of my advertising campaigns? I’ll give the short answer to these questions here and expand on them in future articles.

Where can I find local online marketing opportunities?
The most important (and obvious) answer to this question is search marketing programs from Google and Yahoo. The Google Adwords program is a fantastic program that delivers potential customers from your local market directly to your business website. Yahoo’s Search Marketing works like Adwords and is another good option to get started with. Marketing opportunities from Google and Yahoo will be all many businesses will need. However, there are some potential shortfalls with these programs:

• Some business niches can be very expensive - ten dollars or more for a single click in extreme cases.
• Low traffic business niches may not get an adequate amount of traffic from search marketing programs.
• Search marketing gives little or no branding value - something that businesses in local markets could have some interest in.

If search marketing programs from the major search engines are not meeting all of your online marketing needs, it’s time to find some alternative advertising opportunities. It’s not always easy to find local online marketing that has value. There are some obvious choices, like The Bend Bulletin’s website, or the Source Weekly’s website, but are these actually going to deliver results that are worth the associated costs? What other options are there? I am going to follow up this article with a list of local websites that offer advertising opportunities and my impression of their value.

How much should I be spending on an online advertising campaign?
Your overall budget is something you will have to decide on. The purpose of this question is more to inform you of what amount a particular advertising campaign is worth at a site like the Bend Bulletin. In general, Internet advertising rates are defined by statistics that give you some idea as to how many people are going to see your ad, or visit your site, for a given amount of money spent on the campaign. Unfortunately, most local advertising outlets are just going to quote monthly or yearly rates for listings or banner ads and they aren’t going to tie that rate to any kind of performance metric. This method of ad buying will be much easier for someone just learning about marketing on the Internet, but it may take months for you to figure out whether your money has been well spent. In this scenario, you could be buying advertising that has absolutely no value at all.

I am going to post another article that details some online advertising standards and terminology for those that would like to learn more. For now, there are a couple of questions you can ask the website owners that you are planning on advertising with:

1. How much traffic does their site get? Anyone can throw a site up in a day and make it look like a solid advertising opportunity but without visitors the site is worthless as an advertising medium. Many local sites list advertising rates but do not state their traffic levels. In my opinion, this is an unacceptable practice. Would you advertise in a newspaper that only had a circulation of 5 people? Not likely. Ask them how many unique visitors and page views their site gets per day and per month. Ultimately you have to be the judge on how many visitors you would like to be exposed to your advertisement, but I wouldn’t bother with sites that have less than 1,000 unique visitors per month.

2. Is there a guaranteed number of ad impressions you will be receiving for the money you are spending? Small campaigns of a hundred dollars or less, or things like links or directory listings generally are not paid for on an impression basis, but banner advertisements that run for many months on larger budgets should have some kind of performance metric associated with them. The value of the banners will vary widely based on the market and niche you are in, but an example would be that for every fifty dollars you spend, your ad will be shown on a page 1,000 times. Regardless of the actual price you are paying, if you know this number you can actually make apples to apples comparisons between the various websites you are advertising on, and have some general sense of the value of the ads you are purchasing.

How should I be measuring the results of my advertising campaigns?
Google or Yahoo search marketing programs are going to give you an exhaustive set of statistics that will tell you exactly how many visitors they have sent you and what it cost. Measuring results from local sites is much more difficult.

Websites that are selling you banner advertisements should provide you with a statistics package that you can log into and see how many daily ad impressions (the number of times your ad appeared on a page), and clicks (the number of times users clicked your ad and visited your website) your ad has received. You should occasionally check your own servers referrer logs (through a standard statistics program) and make sure the number of visits from the site you are advertising on roughly matches the number of clicks provided in the publishers banner statistics (this will let you know if there is a possibility that the publisher is falsifying your banner ad statistics).

Programs like directory listings or plain text links may not have statistics, so you will have to rely on your servers referrer statistics to find how many visitors you are getting.

Just Get Started!
There is no question that Internet marketing can be confusing. The best way to get started is to just jump in and do it! Start small, set an initial budget, and start experimenting. Look at the results, adjust your budget accordingly, and keep at it. In time, it will all start to make sense.