Advertising Online
Startling stats
It has been forecast that in 2009 the UK will become the first major economy to see advertisers spend more on the internet than on TV ads. By the end of 2008, the internet will account for 24.8% of UK media spend - hot on the heels of the 26% share held by the TV ad sector, which has been the leading advertsing medium for half a century.
Source: Group M Media Investment Management
Almost all expenditure on traditional media is in decline: advertisers are switching more of their budgets online to build their brands and interact with their customers. The upward momentum of the internet - driven by high-speed broadband take-up and user-generated content - reflects the new reality of sales and marketing.
There are two basic methods of actively advertising your business online: search engine marketing - you pay for a sponsored link (GoogleAd), and banner advertising - you buy space on other relevant sites to display an advertisement.
GoogleAd
A sponsored link is probably the most effective way of marketing a website. It works because you are advertising to an audience that is already interested in you - they are actively looking for your products and services. Cost-per-click pricing means you only pay when people click on your ad, and the fact that you can also specify a daily budget makes it easy to control costs.
The set-up and management of GoogleAd campaigns is something which we're pretty good at. Check out Success Stories and see Campaign Management for further information.
Banner Ads
Advertising your business on other people's websites can be an effective way of raising your own brand awareness. Ads are either in banner format across the top of the page, a "skyscraper" down either side of the page, or a square box. They are often animated (more eyecatching), but the effectiveness is known to decline after a couple of weeks; the design therefore needs refreshing periodically in order to maintain levels of interest.
The costs to the advertiser are based either on
- CPM (cost per thousand impressions): a page impression is when it appears on a user's screen; or
- the click-through rate (CTR): the ad is an HTML link, and clicking on it will take the visitor to your site. You pay a pre-defined amount for every click.
We can design and implement banner advertising for you and help you select suitable sites where your ad might usefully be displayed.
Your site statistics
We have detailed site statistics for all SynchroMesh sites which, among other things, list referrals to each site i.e. we can see where visitors to your site have come from. We can therefore measure the effectiveness of the ad in terms of how much traffic it drives to your site.