Banner ads or Pay Per Click advertising? Are you trying to decide which medium to advertise your business on?
I thought of writing this post after some time trying to explain to a friend of mine over Yahoo Messenger how one is different from the other and I realize a lot of people are undecided when it comes choosing which online advertising medium to use.
So if you were to advertise a product or service, what would you choose… banner advertising or pay per click?
For those who are new to this, let me give you a quick description of each.
Banner advertising is simply the process of purchasing banner space on other websites for you to display a banner about the product or service you wish to advertise.
When choosing the right website to advertise on, you have to take into consideration the website’s traffic (how high or low, and their demographic), how many page views or impressions your banner could get, if the website is using an ad-serving software that allows you to control delivery options, and of course cost which can either be in CPM (cost per thousand impressions), monthly fee or CPA (cost per action).
You can either do the research yourself, by identifying the right websites to make banner ad placements on, or you can advertise through an ad network which have a network of websites who will publish your banner ad on their sites.
Pay Per Click advertising on the other hand is the process of advertising on search engines such as Google. All major search engines have an advertising feature that allows you to advertise on them, but I will talk about Google AdWords since the latter enjoys 65% market share, a commanding lead over Yahoo, MSN and other smaller and regional search engines.
Google AdWords gives you two advertising options, advertising on their Search Network or the Content Network.
If you advertise on Google AdWords’ Search Network, your ad which is in text format, appears only when a keyword you are bidding on, gets searched. Keyword searches trigger your ads. These text ads are typically found in the upper box and the right side box that surround the regular search results. You only get billed by Google if someone clicks your ad, hence pay per click, and you only pay the amount your are bidding, or less, never more.
If you advertise on the Google AdWords Content Network, you can choose to place text, image, or media type ads on websites that belong to Google’s AdSense program, this is a network of websites that publish ads served by Google’s Content Network.
Google AdWords has since inception, added more targeting and payment options to include CPM and CPA, other than pay per click.
What is similar for both banner ads and pay per click ads is that, when the view clicks the ad, the viewer/clicker is taken to your website, or a page on your website specially created to get the visitor to perform a conversion; this is commonly known as the landing page.
What is significantly different for both, aside from the manner of distribution is that banner ads appear to the viewers of the page where the banner ad is found. PPC ads however only appear when a search engine user types in specific keywords, thus presenting itself only when there is a demand. This often yields to higher conversion rates because your service or product is put in front of a search engine user who already has a demand for that type of service of product.
One might be quick to conclude that PPC advertising would then be more effective than banner ads, but banner ads can actually serve a different purpose.
To answer the question about which medium to go with, I would say go with both.
Banner ads tend to work more effectively with high volume websites simply because the impressions are served to all website traffic which are not necessarily as targeted as a pay per click ad served to someone who is in the research phase of a buying process.
Thus, banner advertising can actually help a campaign if its goals are more branding and recall in nature and may not require direct response as a conversion goal, but will still deliver conversions but not as high a percentage compared to conversion rates delivered by pay per click ads.
At the end of the day, any business owner, marketer or advertising specialist is after one thing, return of investment, and the medium that delivers that ROI, after proper campaign planning and optimization, would have to be the best medium to use in advertising your business, regardless of what others may say.
If you have any questions about banner ads, pay per click or other forms of online advertising, feel free to leave your question in the comment section below.
Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to hear an old friend and training mentor Cerwin Eviota, on-air over Y101. He was getting interviewed about the Banilad Town Center (BTC) and I was happy to learn that he serves as Marketing Director for the ritzy mall. Only a few years ago I was a part of the team that launched the BTC and I presented what I thought to be the ideal positioning for the mall and took care of other media related tasks. And yes, they went in that direction.
Cerwin is a career PR and marketing practitioner and one time newsman; and in JCI (Junior Chamber International) he is well respected for his training and coaching abilities in the fields of Organizational Development, Team Building, and Leadership. Cerwin is partly responsible for me getting into training and coaching in JCI. I was a last minute registrant to an important seminar for those interested in pursuing a training career, an application I was almost certain would be denied because the quota had been met. Only 25 people are privileged enough to attend this 3 day course. Lucky for me, he got me in.
Cerwin is on my FB network and I notice him posting some messages about the BTC which I just dismissed as the usual typical “what am I up to” status messages that everyone sees on their network, what caught my attention was when those same messages were the exact same things he was talking about on the air.
Cerwin and I in Kabangkalan, Negros Occidental for a CMS
It reminded me of a time when we were together in Leyte for a Chapter Management and Development Seminar, where our task was to dissect what problems were plaguing a JCI chapter and get them on the right path. I won’t get into the specific activity that I facilitated, but the point was in order for your organization to be heard, to increase ranks, to achieve your goals, you have got to deliver the same clear message each time, and the more times you do it, the more effective you will be in getting that message across.
It my sound simple to many, but very often your audience may not hear about who you are, what you do, what they get from you because you are just not transmitting that message consistently and as many times possible across different mediums.
It is my personal belief that to be successful in marketing you would have to know yourself and your product, or your audience won’t know who you are either. People get caught up with elaborate plans and strategies and overlook what should fundamentally be present, an awareness of who you are and the value you can give to others.
Ask yourself this question.
Have you ever done something extraordinary or accomplished something that noone else could do, but nobody else knew but you or your sister.
Do you have a company that offers an outrageously unbelievable offer and benefit to customers, but only your old regular customers know about it?
The point I am driving at is, you have to talk about who you are and what you offer, and talk about it as many times possible and through various avenues.
The internet has opened up several opportunities especially to business owners or marketers, it has given them a platform to broadcast a message to as many people possible, across the seas and through different timezones.
The advent of Web 2.0 and user generated content that has paved the way for interactive online communities has even made marketing a lot easier by way of engaging these communities and letting them talk about you, letting them sell your message for you, and letting your advertising messages take off virally. Best of all, most of these social media platforms are free.
If you have not done so yet, leverage on the internet, networking and communication available today, take advantage of social media platforms and deliver that message about who you are consistently and clearly and in more web properties, in an ever expanding campaign for audience and customers in an equally expanding world wide web.
Marketing your product, service or business on the internet can have several advantages. However before you sit down and start planning out your online marketing campaign, ask yourself these 3 questions.
Are your customers online?
To put this simply, it really would not make sense to put money on an advertising medium that does not generate revenue because your audience is not on that same medium.
This fundamental principle in advertising applies to all media. If you want to sell a product then you need to advertise on radio and TV stations that the audience you are after listens to and watches; focus your below the line efforts on events that your market has an interest in and will likely be in attendance, and so on.
So if you want to push your product over the internet, ask yourself if your target audience is online.
Finding out if your target demographic is on the internet can be done through surveys or traditional market research, or through online research.
Will your audience perform a conversion online?
A conversion is a specific and predetermined action that you want the recipient of your ad to take. As an advertiser, your goals are probably to make a sale or get a customer.
If you are a pizza place advertising on radio with a radio ad telling the listener to call a number to get a fresh pizza at a discounted price delivered to their doorstep in 30 minutes, then it is obvious the conversion goal here is the call-in and sale.
However your business may not be the type that does transactions over the internet, conversely your product customers may not be the type who buy online.
So you have to then clearly know what your goals for marketing online are.
Each marketing campaign comes with specific goals and online marketing is no different. You should know first what it is you want to achieve through your online advertisements. Do you want to make purchasing or transactions possible over the internet, or are you simply using the internet to gather leads or get inquiries about your product.
Advertising over the internet offers several advantages over media. Aside from the fact that it can potentially be a lot cheaper and more efficient, online advertising is accountable, with data readily available and with the ability to track audience behavior and reaction to advertising, that helps in fine tuning aspects of your campaign.
In the end, all you need to do is determine if your effort online can get you a customer, regardless if instant with a sale done right on your website, or protracted and through a process that starts with getting a lead, to relationship building and then the sale.
Is it worth the expense?
Again, online marketing can cost you much less than traditional media placements, but marketing costs can vary depending on the online marketing strategy or strategies that your consultant lays out for you… and there are several methods; PPC, SEO, email marketing, banner advertising, etc.
It boils down to basic figures; knowing how much you spend, knowing how much profit you make, and knowing the cost per acquisition of every customer and finding ways to get more customers for the same cost of acquisition or lower.
This in turn also goes back to the first question, about your audience being on the internet, and how huge that market could be. As it may turn out, it may not be viable for you if the online audience for your product is too small, and that small volume may not be enough to justify your online spending.
Online advertising is a great way to promote a business, whether you have a product to sell or a service you provide; the internet erases all geographical limits and gives you a worldwide audience, and for those that sell online you can have a store that sells and earns you money while you sleep. That being said, the internet is just another medium to evaluate and use if necessary to reach out to what is actually most relevant to your business, your customers.
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