Ever wanted to find out which half of your advertising budget is working for your business? The trouble with traditional TV advertising, radio, mail shots etc is that it's very difficult to measure return on investment. Who knows which add is bringing in the sales and which one is loosing you shed loads of money? Increasingly businesses are using internet search marketing techniques to promote their products and services. Search marketing is a set of marketing methods used to increase the visibility of a website in search engines. Pay per click advertising accounted for 83 percent of the $5.75 billion invested in search marketing in the US in 2005. Pay per click advertisers sponsor specific search terms to display their ad paying only when a visitor clicks through to their website. Google's Adwords service has the lion's share of the market accounting for 40 percent of all searches.
But why is pay per click advertising growing so fast? For one thing it's highly targeted only displaying ads to searchers already looking to purchase your product. But unlike traditional forms of advertising it can be shown to work. Advertisers can track visitors entering their online shop and follow them right through the store to the checkout. Not only does this give marketers valuable insight into customer behaviour but it can also answer that age old conundrum – which bit of my advertising works? Precise information on the cost of each click through, on conversion rates and on the value of online transactions can be used to calculate the return on advertising spend or ROAS with a high level of accuracy.
Suddenly, you have, at your finger tips, all information that you need to make informed decisions about your marketing strategy. Designing an effective pay per click campaign and installing the tracking software can be tricky. Selection of sponsored keywords, structuring the campaign and writing relevant ad copy are all important to get right. If you don't have online marketing skills in house there are a growing number of specialised web strategy consultants out there that can help.
Which half of your advertising is working – it's the online half!
