advertising: Pay-Per-Click, affiliate marketing |
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| Published:
17 Dec 2009 |
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Running an online advertising campaign will
probably become a necessity for your business at some point,
as it's unlikely that you'll be able to rely on other free
sources. Therefore your website budget should include a significant
amount for at least a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign with a
search engine, as the large majority of web users use search
engines to find a website. You should also consider display
advertising (using banner graphics), building micro-sites,
social networking communities & also directory listings
which allow a short text description (keyword rich) of your
business.
Visibility is key to finding new visitors to your site &
whilst ongoing web promotion
through SEO & link building will provide this over time,
there will inevitably be search phrases where traffic exists
but is out of reach through the free listings & should
therefore be bought rather than disregarded. Well targeted
paid advertising will complement your "organic"
[free] web presence. |
Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) is based on the idea of paying
a search engine to display a small advert within a page of search
results for related searches of your choice. PPC allows your website
to artificially gain a high visibility & receive traffic; paid
placement. The amount that you have to pay to get to the top of
the pile (or near to it) will depend upon the number of other advertisers
that are bidding against you for the same position; the market decides.
In some sectors, such as finance & banking, advertisers will
have to pay several pounds per click in order to see their advert
on the first page. In specialist niches the same visibility can
often be achieved for less than fifty pence per click, but even
at this level the click fees soon add up. Your PPC campaign must
be well targeted towards relevant search phrases & preferably
ones that only a few other advertisers are targeting.
The basis for a successful PPC campaign is to target the right
group of search phrases that you want to use to trigger the display
of your adverts. Also make sure that your "call to action"
is relevant & strong, that your landing page for that phrase
is informative & concise, then hopefully you will begin to see
conversions coming through. One of the beauties of digital advertising
methods is the information that can be collected to measure the
performance of any campaign. One of the most significant factors
is the Click Through Rate (CTR), which is a measure of the number
of times your advert has been displayed (impressions) against the
number of times is was clicked on. By monitoring your results a
campaign can be "tweaked" & refined to improve the
CTR, poor performing phrases can be dropped as other more relevant
ones are discovered.
Splashweb manage PPC campaigns through Google
AdWords ,
Microsoft
Advertising
& Yahoo!
Network
accounts. These complex advertising systems deliver sponsored adverts
to the results pages when related searches are performed. Whether
your advert appears before or after your competitors will depend
upon how much you are prepared to bid for each click [visitor].
Whether the clicks you do get convert into a sufficient return on
investment (ROI) will depend on your understanding of managing PPC
campaigns. High volume PPC campaigns can quickly consume an advertising
budget; poorly performing campaigns should be paused. If your advertising
costs seem to be going too high then you'll have to find ways to
improve your campaign performance, or, find other less competitive
phrases. This will probably mean managing more campaigns but they'll
generally convert at higher rates.
PPC campaign setup requires search
phrase analysis to identify the key campaigns & targeted
search phrases & then creating your account with the relevant
search engine. Setup requires the creation of all the campaigns
with ads for each variant within the campaign, these should include
all of the related search phrases to your website. Write the related
adverts with a suitable call to action & be sure that the destination
page is highly relevant to the ad. Set your bid prices & daily
budget, choose your ad display countries & you're pretty much
ready to go. Once running you need the ongoing management of your
account to review your ad positions, control your bid levels, monitor
CTR performance & make refinements to help the campaign to perform
better. This description relates to text based adverts placed within
search results. There are other forms of media delivery available
such as video streaming. There are also numerous features available,
including scheduling (so you activate your ads at certain times
of the day) & tracking options (to measure campaign conversions);
you can also turn it all off when you go on holiday!!
If you have a limited advertising budget then use PPC advertising
to complement your free search engine traffic, i.e. for the search
phrases that are currently out of reach to you through SEO (Search
Engine Optimisation). In some cases do both to reinforce your
presence on certain phrases. Links that appear as PPC adverts do
not have any permanence & contribute nothing towards the long
term visibility of your website, this is the role of SEO.
display advertising
Being seen as well as being found are of near equal importance,
display advertising is a way of reaching new visitors other than
those you may receive from search engines. Banner advertising, ie.
placing your logo, promotional message or multimedia content on
other websites, will promote your brand & may prove useful to
your link-building strategy.
With so many website's offering this type of service there is a
real need to spend your money wisely.
Directories are similar to search engines in the way they index
sites & their pages, but they rely on the visitor working their
way through a subject index to find the right section. It needs
a bit more effort to get there than searching, but once there you'll
usually be rewarded with good quality & relevant results. This
is in part because many of the best directories have a degree of
manual intervention; a real person not just a piece of software
helps to determine the best placement for your listing. A few well
placed directory links to your website will not only provide another
source of traffic but may help your SEO
strategy too.
Many forums & blogs offer display advertising & may provide
useful placements for your banners at a reasonable cost. Micro-sites
using a targeted generic (keyword rich) domain name are another
great form of display advertising, whereby the whole website is
dedicated to your brand message & can operate independently,
but include suitable links through to your main site. We offer this
form of display advertising through our lease
a domain program & the Harpoon™
network.
affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is an online marketing method whereby a website
[merchant] rewards an affiliate with a commission whenever a successful
transaction occurs, which may be the sale of an item or signing
up to a service. The affiliate will typically be a web publisher
who uses various internet marketing methods to attract traffic.
The affiliate effectively introduces the purchaser to the website
owner who gives a percentage of the profit to the affiliate as a
commission for doing so; there is no penalty to the purchaser.
There are now many affiliate networks, all of which have their
own group of publishers available to them. The networks play an
intermediary role & are able to provide rapid exposure, sometimes
to thousands of website publishers, big & small. We work with
a number of these networks, including: Affiliate
Window,
Buy.at
& WebGains.
If you want to promote your products across one of these networks
you sign up as a merchant.
Affiliate marketing is in principle a CPA (Cost Per Action/Acquisition)
activity, based on payment by results. In practice there is usually
a significant setup & monthly administration cost with all the
popular affiliate networks. However, if they have a good number
of publishers in your sector then this can prove to be a very cost
effective form of internet marketing. Affiliate schemes can be run
in-house too, but the administration will be an overhead & the
program may be seen to lack independent status.
Splashweb have complex software interfaces in place with many of
the affiliate networks allowing us to maintain our own product database
for the Harpoon™
shopping search engine. This system allows us to display both affiliate
& PPC sponsored links alongside each other.
Harpoon™ network
Harpoon™ is a shopping search engine & price comparison
website which currently contains over 5 million products from approximately
500 carefully selected UK suppliers, including many high street
names, popular online brands & specialist stores. Harpoon shopping
search results are also distributed across a network of over 1500
websites, each of which display shopping results targeted to the
relevant retail or services category, such as: outdoorequipment.co.uk,
gardenplants.co.uk
& blenders.co.uk.
The network provides a publishing platform for us to place high
street brand products alongside our own advertiser products (using
either affiliate or PPC links) across all of our network websites.
By joining us advertisers (either affiliate or PPC) will eventually
be able to add their products & get them displayed in Harpoon™
& on any of our other relevant network website's. In addition
we'll give you a listing within our own published directory sites,
where appropriate. We will be very selective in which brands we
sign up, our aim is to create a distinctive & varied shopping
experience for our visitors.
In the background Splashweb will also provide the ongoing web promotion,
monitoring & support for all of the network websites in order
to try & maximise the traffic available to us all.
The Harpoon™
shopping search engine is an ongoing development & is in testing
at this time. If you have an interest in joining this project then
please contact us now. If you're
interested in exclusivity on generic
domains then consider our lease
a domain program.
email marketing
Permission based email marketing can be a very effective way of
keeping in touch with your visitors once you've found them. Providing
an opt-in newsletter type service as a part of your site is a great
way of achieving this. You need to have a clear strategy as to how
& when you'll distribute these emails, declare it as a part
of the sign up process & then deliver!
Short, concisely written newsletters with relevant embedded links
pointing directly at the targeted page work well. The use of HTML
email, allows for a more glamourous newsletter, but should be a
choice you offer the subscriber alongside plain text email.
There are clear legal requirements to be met; recipients must have
given prior consent (either through opt-in or where an existing
relationship exists), it must be clear as to who sent the email
& provision must be included for a recipient to withdraw their
consent (unsubscribe). Anything less than this constitutes spam
& now carries real penalties if you choose to abuse it.
For a much larger distribution you may want to consider buying
a mailing list of opt-in email addresses for you to distribute too.
Be sure that you're happy with the source of any such addresses,
otherwise these emails will arrive essentially untargeted &
may have more of a negative effect on your reputation if they're
perceived as spam. Your own opt-in database whilst smaller will
be personal to you, highly targeted to your website & you can
expect a much more receptive audience. Newsletter features are usually
straightforward to integrate into a web design.
faq: advertising questions
Q : should I use an agency to manage my campaigns?
PPC campaigns are complex & require expertise to be effective.
Use an agency unless you only have a small budget & will only
be running a small number of campaigns. Understand the principles
of Pay-Per-Click advertising before starting & read some of
the great threads to be found in forums. We list some useful web
resources in our web
services directory.
Q : will PPC advertising get me to the first position?
Yes, if you're prepared to bid enough. PPC advertising is a way
of forcing your way onto the first page of the results for a given
search phrase. However, your link will only appear in the sponsored
listings & some people disregard these. Also, your link will
disappear as soon as you stop your campaign. On the other hand PPC
allows you to force visibility at times that suit you on search
phrases that are otherwise out of reach.
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