Online Advertising Strategy – Comparing the Options

Understandably, there is shared frustration among small businesses over how to attract traffic to a newly built site. Unfortunately, visitors don’t come flooding in straight after launch and you need to work at promoting and advertising your website.

With so many advertising opportunities, assessing the options becomes quickly daunting and overwhelming. This article illustrates in point form the advertising possibilities available to website owners and aims to help decipher the differences between them.

Direct Purchase of Ad Space

• Requires finding and negotiating Banner Space direct with website owners such as content sites and blogs.
• Most direct selling publishers prefer to sell Banner Space on a term basis rather than pay per click or cost per thousand impressions.
• This method cuts out middle men such as search engines, media companies, ad agencies and advertising networks.
• Approaching sellers direct gives you the possibility of negotiating lower rates.
• Some blogs and content sites sell Banner Space for as low as $10 per month.
• You can gain a more targeted search as you seek out relevant sites yourself.
• This is not a passive option. There is more work involved than say going through an ad network.
• You will need to locate, contact and negotiate placements yourself.
• Alternatively, you can compare Ad Space at a Banner Auction website.

Search Engine Marketing

• Search engines such as Yahoo! Search, Google, Microsoft’s Bing (formerly Live.com), Altavista.com and Ask.com offer placement of sponsored links in the form of text links in search engine result pages.
• The sponsored text links normally appear above or to the right of the natural search results.
• Search engine marketing programs generally work on a pay-per-click costing method; you pay only when your advertisement is clicked up to your highest bid and set budget amount.
• Advertisers place bids on keywords which they wish to come up for. The price and consequential placement is determined by various factors determined by each search engine’s own formula.
• For example, price and placement in the Google Adwords program is affected by an advertiser’s quality score, which takes into account factors such as ad relevancy to the keywords chosen and the quality of your landing page. The quality score is beneficial for the search engine’s visitors by trying to list relevant quality websites first.
• However, this means that paying a higher price for a certain keyword does not result in higher ranking if the advertiser has a lower quality score than another bidder. In effect, the bidder who paid less for the keyword may end up higher on the list than a higher paying bidder whose quality score was lower.
• Due to the complexity involved, site owners have started to rely on third party search marketing agencies to manage their search marketing campaign.
• Search engine marketing can reap tremendous benefits if used wisely but unfortunately this knowledge comes with learning, practice and testing which is difficult to attain without a sufficient budget to play with.

Advertising Networks

• These companies connect publishers selling Ad Space with advertisers and marketers wanting to place advertisements. Search engines run first tier ad networks, for example: Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network.
• The ad network exchange works on a real-time basis through automated placing of ads on publishers’ websites based on preference selections made by both the publisher and the advertiser.
• Ads will only be placed on websites which have signed up to be part of the ad network’s system.
• Publishers can choose the different ad formats they will accept including banners, skyscrapers, contextual links, buttons, popups, popunders etc.
• Advertising networks are great for building brand awareness through wide distribution.
• With automated placement, you will not be able to determine where and when your advertisement will show, removing the ability to control your campaign to this degree. This is why the use of ad networks may not be appropriate for advertising a niche product and looking for Ad Space direct would find more targeted results.

Ad Agencies

• An ad agency business assists clients in planning and implementing a promotional and advertising campaign.
• Their strategies may involve any or all of the above advertising options including designing/developing your website, search engine optimization/marketing, internet advertising and so on depending on the extent of their retainer.
• Ad agencies work on fee based and/or commission based pricing.
• If you lack time and have a generous budget to start with, you may wish to consult an ad agency about running your campaign.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of options for advertising over the internet but hopefully it has given you some guidance on where to start.

If you have a limited budget and seek a highly targeted audience, then dealing directly with publishers (websites with available or potentially available Ad Space) is a great place to start. Many marketers suggest combining this effort with a pay per click search engine marketing account.

If on the other hand you require a wide audience and you have a sufficient budget, then you may wish to employ and advertising agency to combine its search engine marketing efforts with ad networks and negotiating individual specialized placements to give you a broad reach. Whatever approach you decide upon, always test and track your campaign to ensure you receive maximum results.