The majority of clients I work with are confused and frustrated by online advertising. Typically they have had mediocre results from online advertising campaigns including banner advertising and pay-per-click advertising such as Google AdWords. Let me begin by saying that online advertising is not all bad. When valuated correctly, properly targeted, and meticulously tracked it can yield a very high return on investment.
Evaluating Online Advertising
The most important aspect of online advertising is properly evaluating the value of online ad real estate before purchasing any advertising. This basically comes down to three factors: website traffic, ad visibility (page placement, size, media type), and target audience. You wouldn’t buy a small, obscured billboard on a low traffic street, so why would you want to buy a poorly place banner advertisement on a low traffic website.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The easiest type of online advertising to evaluate and track is pay-per-click. The big player in this market is Google AdWords. With a well organized Google AdWords account you can fine tune exactly what you are willing to pay for each click on each separate search keyword or phrase. You can also geo-target your advertising so it only appears to visitors in certain geographic areas.
Case Study
The graphic at the top of this page shows the results of an online banner advertising campaign for A Taste of Health. The spike in traffic near the end of the graph represents new traffic from an online banner ad on VegWeb.com. During the first week of advertising on VegWeb.com the ad produced and average of 75 visitors per day. With a total monthly advertising cost around $500.00, that makes the average visitor around $0.22. Visitors from VegWeb.com (one of the top vegan recipe and community forum websites in the world) are perfect candidates for A Taste of Health’s vegan cruise and at an average of only $0.22 per visitor it outperforms all other advertising initiatives I have run for A Taste of Health.