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It’s been few years and we have been listening about monetizing the internet usage more than often. This new medium of entertainment and education has brought a great revolution in the economy and a good deal of accomplishment for many people and companies. But the idea is where is this money coming from? There are innumerable ways to make money on internet and advertising is certainly one of them.
What is online advertising?
Online advertising is an advertising platform that uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes search engine marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, many types of display advertising and mobile advertising. Like other advertising mediums, internet adverting also involves both a publisher and an advertiser. The publishers’ work is to incorporate advertisements into its online content and the advertisers make the advertisements to be displayed on the publishers’ content.
Online advertising remains associated with a number of benefits such as
• It can have targeted approach to reaching the customer base
• Is cost effective
• Can be measured at its every step
In this article, we are going to discuss the major advertising platforms that have been benefiting people and business big-time for past many years.
Facebook advertising
Facebook being the largest social networking site has over 1 billion monthly active users on computers and 600 million monthly active users on mobile. Almost everyone who knows how to use internet and have access to it have a Facebook account making it an ultimate platform for marketers looking to connect, engage and do business with people all round the world.
Facebook advertising is the advertising on Facebook, which a social networking site. Like other advertisements in digital marketing Facebook advertisements tends to be a targeted way to reach out to the right audience and establish a relationship with them.
Types of Facebook advertising
There are a variety of advertising options offered by Facebook ranging from advertising your website to your Facebook page. It helps you achieve any kind of goal with these advertising options. Basically, there are five types of Facebook ads that can be utilized for different purposes, which are :
1. Marketplace Ads
2. Page Post Ads
3. Promoted Posts
4. Sponsored Stories
5. Sponsored Results
Tips for Advertising on Facebook
1. Identify Your Audience
In order to use the Facebook‘s brilliant targeting options you first of all need to identify your audience. There are a few relevant questions that you can ask yourself while doing so such as how old your prospect is, where your prospect lives, what are your prospects likes and so on. The more specific your ads and advertising segments are the more clicks you are supposed to get on your ads! Besides, one very important fact about facebook ads is that the better your click through rate (CTR) is, the cheaper your clicks will be.
2. Target correctly
Now when you already know your audience, it will become easier for you to target your audience. Try being as specific as you can be while targeting your audience and get connected with people who share a specific interest related to your brand.
3. Expand Your Base
Promote your posts for them to remain in the feeds of your fans for longer. This is how it can reach out to people who can be your prospects but are not your fans up till now and can expand your base.
4. Pay attention to keywords
Focus on keyword while creating the content. Besides, there cannot be a keyword for images but then the texts that are related to your image can have the keywords and that helps you enhance your visibility and appearance.
5. Test ad variations
Test variations of your ads by taking the advantage of Facebook Power Editor through which you can easily duplicate your ads. Try testing it with different images, different headlines and different the copies of the body. Observe which ads are getting better CTR and then discard the ads with the lower CTR.
6. Target CTR
Unlike Google ads which are both display ads and search ads, Facebook ads are only display ads, which is why the percentage of average CTR of Facebook ads is only 0.1% while that of Google is 1%. That’s why you should not just concentrate on CPC i. e cost per click and should target CTR as higher the CTR lower will be the CPC making it within your means.
7. Figure out the best time to run the ads
Different people use Facebook at different timings. Some are busy throughout the day so they prefer to browse Facebook in the evening and some have a different story. Besides, the most important factor that you can rely upon is the time zones as in the time zone of the fans and the time zone of the demographic which is being targeted. Make sure you post your updates during the peak hours.
8. Make Conversion frictionless
Facebook ads drive the traffic directly to your landing page, make sure you use a single call-to-action there. A single and clear call-to-action will help you convert most of the visitors possible into customers.
9. Send Traffic to an Optimized Landing Page
Instead of driving traffic directly to the sales page try bringing visitors first to an optimized landing page. This is how you will be able to capture the leads. Make sure your landing page directs the targeted Facebook traffic smoothly to the next page for the next action to be performed by them.
10. Keep monitoring Your Performance
Keep watching your performance time to time through tools like Analytics. See if the ads are giving you desired results if not make relevant changes in them and keep testing your ads.
11. Include one Clear Call to Action on Your Landing Page
You need to have an intelligible call-to-action at both the places in the Facebook ad itself and also on the landing page. Try including call-to-action that will compel the visitor to take an action.
12. Track and Calculate ROI
There are five things that are required to calculate the ROI i.e. return on investment and they are Average profit per sale, the total cost of Facebook ads, the total number of impressions, Conversion Rate and the click rates or the response rate. You need to figure out as to how much you are paying to get each sale. Once, you have this data you can easily calculate the profit. This is why we ask you to assess your marketing performance.
Google Adwords Advertising
Google Adwords is all about displaying your ads on Google and you have to pay when people click your ads. You choose keywords and create your own ads depending on your business, which will appear on Google. When people search anything that includes your keywords, they may see your ads next to the search results. This is how your product is being watched by somebody who is already looking for that.
Moreover, Google adwords’s features include targeting of ads according the i.p addresses apart from location and language targeting. Advertisers can specify the i.p address ranges where they don’t need the ads to appear. Another very important feature of Google adwords is frequency capping which limits the number of times ads appear to same user.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is actually advertising over the internet where in advertisers pay the publisher when their ad is clicked by the audience. It is also known as cost per click marketing. It is a type of Google adwords advertising. Basically, in PPC marketing your ads are shown on other websites and if the user clicks on it the advertiser has to pay fixed rate for each click.
Significant Tips on Google Adwords Advertising, (PPC)
Don’t forget to do Keyword Research
Do your keyword research properly before investing in Google adwords advertising or Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You can make use of the excellent, free keyword tools provided by Google before you create an ad campaign such as Google insights, Google adwords Keyword Planner and Google adwords traffic estimator Sandbox.
Build your website meticulously
Even a small thing on your website does matters. A small change on it can bring substantial results to your business and can improve your conversion rate considerably. In the same adwords’budget you can generate more leads and can make more sales by having a well planned and executed website.
Make Sure Your Web Site is responsive
Use of mobile phones and tablets to access internet and make the purchases has become the latest trend among the masses. People’s inclination towards these devices is increasing at a phenomenal rate. Hence, do check your website if it works properly on mobiles and tablets and if doesn’t work well on these devices make it work well and get a responsive website.
Track Conversions
You must track how much are you paying for each lead to keep an eye on your budget and the ad’s performance. Then only you would be able to figure out which traffic sources proved worth and what keywords are giving you results. Besides, you can always make changes to your ad campaigns based on the result that they are generating.
Bring Google Analytics into play
Go ahead and turn on the auto tagging, set up the e-commerce tracking and link the adwords and analytics. It will give you immense information of your purpose such as where the traffic is coming from, where they are leaving your website, which keywords are bringing more traffic and so on.
Make Sure Your Landing Page is consistent with the ad
Ensure that the destination URL for the respective ad is about the ad and is not any other webpage like your homepage. The message on the landing page should be consistent with what it is on the ads so that the consumers should discard the process in between due to lack of consistency in the message as they are not going to find what they were looking for.
Have a clear call to action in your AdWords ads
Make use of clear call-to-action in your adwords ‘ad such as ‘Download A Free Trial Now!’, ‘Buy Now!’ and so on for visitors to take action. Sometimes they might look down market and tacky however if it doubles the click through rate of your ad then it’s worth including a compelling call-to-action in your adwords’s ad.
Make use of different keyword match types
There are three types of keyword match, which are broad match, phrase match and exact match. You can use different keyword match types in different ads depending on the requirement. However, as far as bidding is concerned, ideally you should bid most on exact match and less on phrase or broad match.
Declare negative keywords
Negative keywords are the keywords in pay per click advertising which prevent your ads from displaying for particular keyword phrase. This is how you can save a lot of money from going waste due to unnecessary & useless clicks.
Think about Bidding on Your Own Brand Keywords
Someone searching for your brand is more likely to buy from you however scene could be different if they are searching for a generic keyword or other brands. Therefore, it’s good to bid on your own brand keywords as the conversion rates tends to go higher and CPCs exhibit a drop.
Employ Google Conversion Optimizer (CPA bidding)
Enable ‘Conversion Optimizer’ or ‘CPA Bidding’ and let Google know that you want as many sales as possible within the budget that you have fixed. However, if the conversions that you are getting in 30 days are not enough, then you will not be able to use Google conversion optimizer. In such case you can make use of ‘Enhanced CPC bidding’.
Test multiple versions of ad
Google with multiple features allows you create and rotate multiple ads within a single group. You can take advantage of this feature and test different ads text to figure out which version of the ads working best as in which ones are bringing better return on investment and better click-through rate.
Twitter advertising
Twitter advertising as the name signifies is advertising on twitter, which is a social networking and a microblogging site. Users can use twitter to share their thoughts, news, information and jokes in 140 characters of text or less. Twitter is one of the largest and rapidly growing communication platforms across the globe. As it is steadily gaining momentum increasing numbers of people are wishing to get on board with its adverting platforms.
Types of Twitter advertising
Depending upon their feature there are three types of twitter adverting
• Promoted trends
• Promoted accounts
• Promoted tweets
Tips for advertising on Twitter
Place the promoted tweet well
Being a brand you might want to fasten a promoted tweet to the top of your timeline. However, be it promoted tweets or the promoted pages they will naturally show up in the left sidebar of your page until you specify that you want your tweet to be at the top of your timeline.
Make use of Hashtags
In order to make your tweets more searchable and live on the twittersphere try using twitter hashtags. You can do it in two ways either you create your own distinctive hashtag to make a difference from others or else you can get on an existing trending hashtag as that will increase exposure.
Uphold good content
Each action of yours impacts your brand image especially when it is on the social media sites as things get viral very easily. Hence, do your due diligence to test and distill your content before making it public. Make sure the content that you are delivering through your ads is as relevant and informative as it could be. Besides, in twitter prefer to select “Manually select your tweets” for you to have full control over what is being released to the public.
Bring Geographic Targeting into play for Improved Results
In order to exhibit a better return on the investment that you have done on twitter advertising it is always better to target your promoted tweets at users in a particular geographic location.
Have a strong and clear calls-to-action in your ads
For the audience to take action and find a way to the next step after they have been through your add ensure to have a strong and clear call-to-action.
Use the language used by the audience
To make your adds more acknowledgeable and happening try using the language that your audience are using in your messages. This will not only make your tweets more searchable but also be loved by the audience.
Never ever over advertise
Ideally, the number of times one should advertise on twitter should be once or twice a day, otherwise it gets turned into spam. For every 15-20 tweets, you can use one advertisement at max. In order to retain your followers and not lose them always tweet helpful and relevant information in between the advertising as that will not be annoying for the audience.
Use Analytics
Make sure you track your analytics to make necessary changes to your campaign and ensure that you are getting most out of your efforts that you are putting in for twitter advertising. Besides twitter’s own analytic platform, make use of your marketing analytics to figure out how your twitter adverting efforts are contributing to leads and sales as well. Not just that, with analytics you can easily monitor the daily overheads of each campaign in the twitter ads interface.
Display banner advertising
Display banner ad is simply an ad in the form of a hypertext link. When users click on a certain part of text on the ads a bit of HTML code instructs a web server to bring up a specific web page. Display banner ads are usually a link in the form of a box containing graphics and animation.
Types of Display Banner Ads
As per the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) there are eight types of display banner ads according to their pixel dimensions. A pixel is the smallest unit of color used to make up images on a computer or television screen. Following are the eight types of banner ads
I. Full Banner (486 x 60 Pixels)
II. Full Banner with Vertical Navigation Bar (392 x 72 Pixels)
III. Half Banner (234 x 60 Pixels)
IV. Vertical Banner (120 x 240 Pixels)
V. Square Button (125 x 125 Pixels)
VI. Button 1( 120 x 90 Pixels)
VII. Button 2 (120 x60 Pixels)
VIII. Micro Button (88 x 31 Pixels)
Tips to make display Banner Ad more Effective
Post ads on pages with related content
It is the ultimate mantra for display banner ads to work. Make sure you post your ads on pages with related content. The more related it is to the content on the site where it is being shown, the better results it is going to bring.
Keep it precise and to the point
Instead of advertising your website in general through these ads try promoting a particular product or service in your ads.
Make sure the landing page is consistent
While you are advertising about a certain product and service in your banner ads, link it to a relevant landing page that talks about these product and services and don’t divert the consumers to the home page simply.
Ensure proper positioning of the ads
Try putting your ads at the top of the web page instead of putting it farther down. It will add to its significance.
Keep it short and simple
While creating your ads try using simple messages to be conveyed than the complicated ones as the audience will not find them annoying then. A complicated message on the ads can irritate the audience.
Animations are always a great way
Try using animated ads instead of the static ones as that looks compelling and interesting to the audiences.
Use comprehensible Graphic content
Design your graphic content in a way that it should not seem obscure to the audiences and should rather pique their curiosity.
Keep it easy to load
Make sure the sizes of your ads are considerably small for it to load in relatively lesser time. Otherwise by the time the ads will load itself completely the visitors might have changed the page.
Afterword
Online advertising can endow businesses with momentous benefits by providing a reach, range and scale that was not possible before the advent of internet. Besides, the ever-changing technology has lead to the increase in the number of devices businesses can leverage to reach their target market. Identify this trend of the market and control online advertising to gain the ultimate results.
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