Why pay for advertising? Developing your brand online, just like developing your brand on television or in the “brick and mortar” world, requires that you make your brand well-known to your target market. When a potential customer searches Google for your product and your website comes up, you want their reaction to be “yeah, I’ve heard of them”. How do you achieve that goal? Advertising.
Pay-per-click? You’ll find that one of the most common forms of internet advertising is “pay-per-click” advertising. The major search engines offer it, as does YouTube, and a lot of other major websites. It means that they will display your ad with a link to your website in relevant places (like at the top of the Google results for your best search terms) and you agree to pay a certain amount for every time a user clicks that link. This can be very effective at driving traffic to your website, especially if it is a new website that has not yet established a strong presence in the search engines.
Paid Ads and Sponsorships. Another common way you can advertise is to simply pay a website to display your ad and link. Smaller websites often allow this, as do many discussion forums.
Is it effective? If you have properly configured website analytics, we can tell you exactly how effective any online advertising campaign is by looking at the referral source statistics. This information is included in our monthly or quarterly Website Performance Report service. However, there may be intangible benefits to pervasive and consistent brand identity marketing. Even if the advertised links aren’t being clicked as often as you would like, just having your name out there in as many places as possible will help to develop valuable brand recognition.
Where to advertise. Search engines are the easiest and most obvious answer, but there are many more websites that it may be beneficial for you to advertise on. We can help you find them with our Online Brand Analysis report, which includes a full analysis of your industry online, including popular forums and informational websites.
