Whether online or not, the main goal of advertising is usually to increase sales. As well as this, advertising aims to increase brand awareness and share of voice in the marketplace. Advertising is based on the simple economics of demand and supply. Advertisers aim to stimulate a consumer need (demand) and then satisfy that need (supply).
Online advertising has a number of objectives. Those align with the goal hierarchy. Here are some of the most common goals or nesting objectives and how online advertising helps implement the strategic approach:
Making people aware of a brand or product is an important long-term goal for any marketer. Once customers know about the brand, the marketer has taken the first step towards gaining the customer’s trust and patronage.
Online, creative advertising or banner advertising is largely visual, making it an ideal channel for promoting brand collateral. The visual strengths can be communicated well through this medium.
Creating consumer demand is a three-step process: inform, persuade and remind. Consumers can’t want what they don’t know about. Advertising needs to convince consumers about what they should want and why they should want it.
Modern online advertising provides a great way to communicate the unique selling points (USPs).
Once the consumer is aware of and wants a product, they need to find out how to satisfy that desire. If brand building has been effective, they will know that a particular brand exists.
At this point, it is essential for the marketer to show the consumer how their particular brand or product will best meet that need.
The immediacy of online advertising also drives traffic and sales in the short and medium terms. Unlike traditional media advertising, online advertising can immediately turn the potential customer into an actual customer.
What’s more, measuring accurately how effective the online advertising campaign has been is possible.
Online advertising can drive instant sales and conversions.
Unlike other advertising mediums, the consumer can go from advert to merchant in one easy click. Because of the connected nature of the Internet, online activities are highly trackable and measurable, which makes it possible to target adverts and to accurately track and gauge the efficacy of the advertising.
Online is just another channel to help implement our strategy and assist consumers through the buying behaviour process.
Campaign planning and marketing strategy are closely intertwined, with campaign planning serving as a tactical implementation of the broader marketing strategy.
Online advertising can be effectively utilized at various stages of the purchase funnel to engage with potential customers guide, support, and encourage them through the buying process.
By tactically executing online advertising in alignment with your overarching strategy, you can master how to use these tools to maximize the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Ad Formats for the audience need to be chosen carefully.
There are many options available.
Online ads need to follow the ACE principles
As well as include…
Copywriting refers to the written copy used in the ads. It must follow specific guidelines to be effective.
Samples of Persuasive Ad Copy:
Align your Budget with your campaign objectives and expected outcomes.
Bidding allows you to compete for ad placement by setting bids on keywords, audiences, or placements, with higher bids typically resulting in higher ad visibility and placement.
Platform-specific features and tools for optimizing campaigns, such as Google’s Smart Bidding and Microsoft’s Audience Ads give specific platforms an edge when tactics are designed around these features.
Analytics and tracking are vital to online advertising campaigns as they provide invaluable insights into campaign performance, allowing advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their efforts, optimize strategies in real-time, and make data-driven decisions to maximize ROI.
Align with your goals, your strategy, your target audience, and the format of your adverts.
Your online adverts will need to:
All advertising needs an appropriate landing page.
Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, is a bid-based online advertising platform that you can use to promote your business, help sell products or services, raise awareness, and increase traffic to your website.
Google Ads offers businesses a powerful and versatile online advertising platform:
Take all of your campaign planning information and choose the campaign type(s) that align
Set bidding settings as per your campaign type, overall budget, keyword, and target plan, as well as desired outcomes.
Set targeting options to reach the right audience and maximize campaign effectiveness.
Set out your ad formats and creative taking into account your campaign planning
Take all other campaign optimization factors specific to Google into account
Once the campaigns have been launched, it is time for on-going monitor and control
Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Advertising) is an online advertising platform developed by Microsoft, where advertisers bid to display brief ads, service offers, product listings and videos to web users.
Microsoft offers a very similar online advertising platform to Google Ads:
Take all of your campaign planning information and choose the campaign goal that align.
Set targeting options to reach the right audience for maximizing campaign effectiveness.
Set budget settings as per your campaign type, overall budget, and keyword.
Set out your ad formats and creative taking into account your campaign planning.
Take all other campaign optimization factors specific to Google into account.
Once the campaigns have been launched, it is time for on-going monitor and control.
Many Other Options We Will Discuss Upcoming!
Social Ads, Pinterest, Amazon, Reddit, etc.
The trackability of online advertising is what makes it so superior to conventional advertising.
There are similarities to traditional. Making it fertile ground for testing.
If done correctly, online is much more informative and inviting, meaning less intrusive than traditional forms. Usually, it is significantly cheaper and easier to justify spend.
There are many different conversion points you might want to test with advertising. You can test to see how different adverts might improve click through rate or you can test to see how different adverts affect the conversion rate of the traffic coming to your website.
Things like bandwidth or browser speeds can cause issues with online ads. Data limitations are making targeting more difficult.
Ad blindness is a real issue. We subconsciously train ourselves to ignore advertising we are ‘not interested in’. Consumers are suffering from advertising fatigue, so while new technologies can provide great results, as soon as the market moves mainstream it can get saturated. Consumers are increasingly ignoring adverts.
As well as most browsers now blocking pop-ups, there are also extensions available for the Mozilla Firefox browser, such as AdBlock Plus, that will block advertising on web pages. Technologically savvy consumers are increasingly using these methods to limit the advertising that they see.
Creating a Google Search Campaign:
Campaigns
This is the highest level. It’s a set of ad groups that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings. They’re used to organize categories of products or services you offer.
Stick to just one goal per campaign, like increasing sales of a particular item, or getting newsletter signups.
Max 25 campaigns per account.
Next level – these contain a set of similar ads and keywords.
You should be able to develop at least two ad groups per campaign.
Max 100 ad groups per campaign.
Ads include your copy and assets; each ad can have many keywords.
Keywords are the foundation of SEM. These words or phrases describing your product or service determine where your ad appears.
Your ad may appear when someone searches for words similar to your keywords.
Also called SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Search engine marketing (SEM) is a method of promotion and advertising to help companies’ content rank higher among search engine traffic.
“Search engine marketing’s greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to put their ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment they’re ready to make a purchase.”
– Wordstream
Competition can be high. We need to compete where there is the most value for us.
Usually more expensive than display – around $5-$10 per click might be typical, but it varies widely by industry. The most expensive words can be $50+ per click.
CTR is usually higher than display. Around 2% is a good starting point to aim for.
Google Ads is the largest. Most of Google’s revenue comes from this platform (both search and display).
Display ads are ads that are shown on the articles, videos, or websites that consumers browse.
More generic term for visual ads
A more passive form of advertising.
Allows the content of your ad to change depending on who is looking at it or even where they are looking at it (display different offers or products to different groups).
Interstitial are banners shown between pages on a website. As you click from one page to another, you are shown this advert before the next page.
Pop-ups are how they sound. These are adverts which pop up, or under, the web page being viewed. They open in a new, smaller window.
This advert appears in a layer over the content. Like a popup but layered from another entity.
Usually, the user can close this advert quickly. Very annoying.
This is advertising placed within the available online mapping solutions, such as Google Maps.
Becoming very important for local search.
Video advertising is the use of video content to sell products or services. Video advertisements are one of the most effective forms of advertisements, as moving images are more accessible for customers to recall than static images or text.
Can be done in full commercials, skippable, and bumpers.
Static banners are in GIFs or JPEG format, but banners can also employ rich media such as Flash, video, JavaScript, HTML5, and other interactive technologies.
These can be set up on ad platforms or on stand-alone one-offs.
Shopping ads appear at the top of search results when you use search terms that indicate you’re shopping for a specific product. The ads contain information about the product such as color, size, price, the seller, and a picture of the product.
Display advertising and affiliate marketing go hand in hand. Affiliate networks also act as advertising networks, allowing for advertising to be purchased on a performance basis.
Influencers can be a form of affiliate.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Refers to a type of online advertising that seamlessly blends in with the form and function of the platform on which it appears. Unlike traditional banner or display ads, native ads match the visual design of the website or app where they’re placed, making them less disruptive and more integrated into the user experience.
These ads can take various forms, including sponsored content, promoted listings, in-feed ads on social media platforms, and advertorials. The key characteristic of native advertising is its ability to mimic the look and feel of the surrounding content, often making it more engaging and less intrusive to users.
Native advertising is popular because it tends to be more effective in capturing attention and driving engagement compared to traditional advertising formats. However, there is also a need for transparency to ensure that users can distinguish between editorial content and paid promotions. Platforms typically require native ads to be clearly labeled as such to maintain trust with their audience.
Remarketing & Retargeting
Remarketing refers to engaging audiences who have already interacted with your brand, to encourage them to take a desired action that may interest them, such as conversion. For example, customers might log in to your site and add products to their shopping cart but leave without purchasing.
Very powerful.
Ads that convince people to click on them are clear, specific, and compelling. The idea is to “target” your audience by convincing your customers that your products or services are what they’re looking for.
Match your ad as closely as possible with what they’re searching for.
CPI stands for cost per impression. This means the advertiser pays each time the advert appears on the publisher’s page. The most common way of referring to this model is CPM or cost per thousand impressions (the letter M is the Roman numeral for a thousand). This is how a campaign is normally priced when brand awareness or exposure is the primary goal.
CPC stands for cost per click. This means the advertiser only pays when their advert is clicked on by an interested party, regardless of how many times it was viewed. CPC advertising is normally associated with paid search marketing, also called pay per click (PPC) advertising. Banners can be priced this way when the aim is to drive traffic. It is also a payment method sometimes used in affiliate marketing, when the aim is to drive traffic to a new website.
CPA refers to cost per acquisition. This model means the advertiser only pays when an advert delivers an acquisition. CPA is the best way for an advertiser to pay because they only pay when the advertising has met its goal.
Target return on ad spend (ROAS): If you want to optimize for conversion value, you can use Target ROAS to help increase conversion value while targeting a specific return on ad spend (ROAS)
With this model, advertisers pay for rollover adverts, normally placed in videos or applications (such as Facebook applications) and based on the interactions with that advert. An interaction, sometimes referred to as an engagement, means they have interacted with that ad via click or extension.
Sometimes owners of lower-traffic sites choose to sell banner space at a flat rate i.e. at a fixed cost per month, regardless of the amount of traffic or impressions. This would appeal to a media buyer who may be testing an online campaign that targets niche markets. There are several variations to what a sponsorship on a website entails.
When planning a campaign, it is important to know how the advertising will be paid for and what kinds of advertising are offered by publishers. A lot of this can be solved by using a company which specialises in advert serving, media planning, and media buying.
An advertising network is a group of websites on which adverts can be purchased through a single sales entity.
Advertising exchanges, on the other hand, are where unsold inventory is placed by publishers for bidding. It allows publishers to fill unsold inventory at the highest available price, and can give smaller advertisers access to this inventory.
Campaign Objectives: The payment model chosen often depends on the advertiser’s campaign objectives. For example, CPC may be preferred for traffic generation campaigns, while CPA may be suitable for conversion-focused campaigns.
Budget and Risk Tolerance: Advertisers with limited budgets or risk-averse may prefer CPC or CPM models, where they pay only for clicks or impressions, whereas advertisers with higher budgets and confidence in conversion rates may opt for CPA.
Industry and Competition: The industry and competitive landscape may also influence the choice of payment model. Some industries may have higher CPCs or CPAs due to increased competition.
The Budget is Derived from Your Marketing Budget
Marketing Budgets are typically 5%-25% of revenue or revenue target.
PPC usually receives 10%-30% of that Marketing budget. This is unique, and it could be more or less. Needs, goals, business type, top-down or bottom-up structure, and ROI all play a part in this decision.
Ideally, budgets would be built from the bottom up.
Usually a % is carved off the corporate budget and allocated down.
Fixed budget: Allocate a set amount of money for the PPC campaign over a specific period.
Flexible budgeting: Adjust spending based on performance and available resources, allowing for more agility and optimization.
Choose a local business website.
Ad servers serve adverts across several websites, and can track a user visiting sites using cookies or IP addresses.
This means that ad servers can offer advertisers:
The ad server can also target adverts based on the business rules of the advertiser or based on the profiles of the users:
Day and Time: advertisers can choose the time of day or day of the week when their adverts are shown. Advertisers can specify when their campaign should air, down to the minute. This usually depends on the client’s objective for the campaign or the product itself.
Social Serving: websites gather demographic data about users and then serve each user with targeted and relevant advertising. For example, Facebook will allow advertisers to select specific characteristics of users who will be shown an advert.
Behavioural Targeting: the ad server uses the profile of a user (built up over previous websites visited) to determine which adverts to show during a given visit.
Contextual (placements or topic based) Advertising: the ad server infers the optimum adverts to serve based on the content of page.
They play a crucial role in the success of PPC campaigns by providing a seamless and relevant post-click experience for users.
Landing pages are standalone web pages specifically designed to convert visitors into leads or customers after clicking on a PPC ad.
Our keyword lists are developed by going through tools such as Google keyword planner, Google trends, SEMrush, ahref, etc. and assessed for their potential reach, traffic acquisition, difficulty, intent, and conversion potential
Consider the intent behind search queries and select keywords that align with your campaign objectives.
Ad extensions are additional pieces of information or interactive elements that enhance your ads, making them more prominent and engaging.
They provide extra value to users and improve ad visibility, CTR (click-through rate), and overall campaign performance.
Benefits of Ad Extensions
Testing is critical in optimizing PPC advertising campaigns by identifying the most effective strategies and improving overall performance.
It allows advertisers to make data-driven decisions, refine targeting, messaging, and creative elements to maximize ROI.
Best Practices for Testing
