I rarely walk in to a brick and mortar store to shop, well firstly because I rarely shop. Second reason is, shopping online is just more convenient, and I don’t end up feeling like an idiot cutting in to check out and someone telling me out loud, “there’s a line back here.”

To make a long story short, upon paying for the purchase I get asked for my email address, and while I could have probably declined, I thought I’d go with it to see how Old Navy will use the information they have about my purchase, and if they were going to send me any unsolicited email. I gave the cashier an email address I rarely use.

But what kind of information does Old Navy actual get from this?

Aside from what was purchased and an email address associated with a purchase, they know what items are most popular, for what pricing, in what location, and whole lot more which I will not get into now.

The most important question is, will Old Navy SPAM me with unsolicited email? The answer, YES.

When I was asked by the cashier for my email address, I asked what for and she replied “for the receipt.” She did not say any more.

When I gave her my email address, the understanding there is that is the only purpose for the email address request. If Old Navy sends me an email whether marketing or not, this is spam because I did not request for them to send me anything through email and would then be sending me an unsolicited message. They did not ask for my permission to send me email, and so did not get any so they should not be sending me an email.

Well, as it turns out.. they did send me an email immediately after purchase, sending me a copy of their receipt and a survey.

The rule of thumb in collecting emails for marketing purposes is, always get explicit approval and the person giving you their email address should know what you will use the email address for, otherwise you will be sending out SPAM just like Old Navy did.

български икони

“Hi Mr Sencio. I’m just wondering where you are based because my question has something to do with where I’m from which is here in the Philippines. I made a website and I want to start asking sponsors to help me pay for my own domain. How much does a website charge for ads?”

First of all there “there are no standard pricing structures across the Internet” for banner ads. The only way to determine how much you should charge is to see how much other sites just like yours are charging.. and by other sites I mean, websites with similar traffic, demographics, banner sizes and location on the page or on the website.

Traffic
Advertisers are paying for exposure on a website, so they put their ads on websites that have traffic. If your website does not have any, it is likely you will have a hard time getting anyone to book ads on your website.

Demographics
More than just exposure, advertisers want the right exposure. They want to reach out their target audience who are the people they see buying the product or service they want to advertise.

Banner Sizes
There are many different standard banner ad sizes, and pricing is obviously also influenced by size. The bigger the size, the bigger the ad creative you can use, and the clearer an advertiser’s message may be read by the web site’s visitors.

Location on Page/Website
Where a banner ad is found on a page, or what page on the website also affect price. Think of banner ads as billboards; the ones that are easily seen by motorists and the ones that are on a busy street usually cost more than those that are not immediately visible or those that are in back alley.

Banner ads found visibly near the top of the page or anywhere above the fold (the lower edge of the visible webpage before a visitor scrolls down) are usually higher in cost. Furthermore, banner ad locations on the main page or pages that get the most number of views usually cost higher than other pages that have less page views.

Whether you are in the Philippines, the US or anywhere in the world, banner advertising is an Internet commerce channel that knows no boundaries and more importantly largely unregulated with standardized pricing. It really comes down to the value that your website offers to potential advertisers and being able to convince them spending their ad budget on your site is worthwhile, otherwise they can easily find another website that is cheaper than what you are offering and may beat you in the aspects of traffic, demographic, size options and site and page placement.

How Other Websites Charge?

Flat Rate – Where you simply charge a monthly rate for the exposure you are giving them on your website.

Per CPM – A little more complicated, it stands for cost per thousand, where an advertiser pays a certain dollar amount for a thousand impressions. This is often the standard method used, and common among large websites with a lot of traffic and a lot of potential views of these pages.

Per Click – As it suggests, an advertiser pays a certain amount each time the ad is clicked by a viewer, a little more complicated to implement and needs more advanced software and tracking mechanisms in place.

What to Do Next?

Start promoting your website in order to get more visitors to it. You should also have some sort of tracking mechanism in place for you to see how many visitors are getting. Later on you would need to determine the demographic of your visitors, and that is largely influenced by the content of your website and how easily your website is found through links on other websites or through search engine listings.

Lastly, I am a Filipino in New York City.КартиниИдея за подаръкикониПравославни иконииконописikoni

Does the Website Have Any Traffic?
The main reason you advertise on a website is exposure, and if a website does not have visitors, then you likely won’t get that exposure.

Most websites that sell advertising space on a regular basis have information about their site that will help you make a decision. This information is found in a Media Kit, that you can download or send an email or contact request for.

So the first thing you can do if you want to advertise on a website is see if they have a page where you can find, download or request for that information.

The Media Kit typically has an overview of their visitors, with general traffic figures, the types of advertising they accept, rates and other advertising terms. Some may go into more detail and reveal visitor demographics.

So what about the ther web sites that do not offer a Media Kit? You can ask the website owner or administrator for traffic information.  Ask them for a copy of their Google Analytics stats. If they refuse, then take your business elsewhere. If they do agree to give you Google Analytics data, try to get data for the last 3-6 months. What you are trying to determine is consistency of traffic, and what their general traffic sources are. A good sign that a site is a great place to advertise on is if they have consistent traffic and a huge number of them come from Google searches, and referrals from other websites.

Is the Website’s Traffic the Type of Traffic You Want?
Sometimes it is not about the quantity, but the quality of visitors. You need to verify if the visitors the website gets are the type of visitors you want to reach out to and would be interested in your products or services. This is where demographic information can come in handy. A website that regularly sells banner ad space almost always has information about their visitors like gender, age, status.. or even education and individual or household income.

If a website cannot provide you with such information, you can try various free tools online that can give you insight into their visitors, one tool you can use is the Google Ad Planner. To use it, all you need to do is type in website you want to do research on in the space, then hit the blue arrow beside it. You will also see traffic estimates using Google Ad Planner but this will not be as accurate as the site’s own traffic statistics.

Is the Price, Right?
There are typically three ways you can pay for banner advertising.  One, is simply an agreed fixed rate on a monthly or weekly basis. The second is by CPM, short for cost per thousands where you pay an amount for every 1000 impressions of your banner. An impression is one instance when your banner ad was displayed because the page it is found on was loaded on a visitor’ browser, which is what happens when a visitor landed on that page. So if the rate is 50 cents CPM, and you get 1000 impressions in a day, you pay a total of $5 for that day for those impressions. Third is per click, where you pay for every click your banner ad gets. There is no “better” means among the three, and it would depend on your costs and conversions and your being able to determine which method gives you the least expense per conversion.

Rates for banner advertising are not regulated, so a website can actually charge as much as they deem they are worth. What’s funny is some websites charge too much for ad space even if they do not have the traffic to make the placement worth the expense.

So one way to really be able to get a grasp how much to pay is to first get rates from different websites and make a note of how much traffic they get, and what kind of traffic they have. This will give you an idea what the rates are for websites of a certain size and who get a certain amount of traffic. You also do not need to target high traffic websites, you can find smaller websites that have fewer traffic, but it’s visitors may be the exact market you want to reach.

More than just getting traffic through advertising, you want to get converting traffic; visitors that becomes leads or customers.

That said, it is important to note that different websites may charge different rates, and at the end of the day you don’t go with the website that offers the best price, but the website that delivers an ROI.

What you would need to do is always ask to do a small test first before taking on a full blown ad package. This way you can determine if the traffic you get converts. As a test, you can run ads for a week or two and spend less. This way you get a sample of their traffic and determine if that web site’s visitors will respond favorably to your banner ad and your products/services offered, without you having to pay the full advertising amount.

If the website does not allow tests, ask them if carry an opt out clause in your contract, which will allow you to cancel your arrangement within a certain span of time if the advertising placement does not work for you, does not yield any conversions (leads or sales) for you. You will then only need to pay for advertising for the duration that your banner ad was live on the site.

To be a smart website or online business owner, you need to make some smart decisions especially with online advertising. Smart decisions can only be made if you have the necessary information that help you make an informed decision to do a small test, that if upon delivering good results, you can then scale up into a full blown banner ad campaign on that website, taking advantage of their visitors whom you have found to be that targeted audience you seek for what it is you are offering.

You must design a marketing program that offers a series of action steps to the prospective customer. The sooner you do this, the faster your Internet investment will pay off.

Direct markets use an acronym to remind them of what every marketing campaign needs: AIDA. This stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.

Attention is step one. If the visitor has arrived at your Web site, it had better grab his attention. I hope your site does this rapidly. Visitors get bored, fast.

I suggest that you make a promise or offer, stated early, and clearly visible on your site within a few seconds. I also suggest that you minimize graphics. Graphics reduce download time.

Let’s say that you have his attention. You must now interest him. You must find a way to present information to him that will keep him from clicking to another site.

Maybe you remind him of a problem he now faces or will soon face (fear). Maybe you present an opportunity that he has not thought of (greed). Fear and greed are the buyers’ great motivators in business-related sales.

You have his interest. You must now produce desire. The question is: Desire to do what? You are leading him to take action.

The action you should motivate him to take is to identify himself, so that you can contact him again by automated e-mail. You must persuade him to request something: a free report, a short course, a list of specifications – something. Whatever it is, by requesting it, he sends you his e-mail address.

This is the key to profitability. Your Web site should have several useful functions: to gain the visitor’s attention, to create interest, to create desire, and to generate an action step. Very few Web site designers have self-consciously applied AIDA. They are technicians and artists, not marketers. Not that many marketers understand AIDA.

His action steps should not cost him any money. You want his e-mail address. Offer him something of immediate value to get that e-mail address. Offer him several things, if you can.

Think carefully about what you would want from your site if you were a first-time visitor to your site. Empathize.

What do you want him to do after he reads a special report? What is the next action step you want him to take? Design everything in your free reports to generate one final action step per report. I suggest that you get him to subscribe to a newsletter. Then you can contact him regularly.

Another possibility: get him to sign up for a free e- mail course. For this, you should probably use a sequential or follow-up autoresponder. You can offer a course using only free one-shot autoresponders, but you must rely on the reader to click a click-and-send link to receive each subsequent lesson. He may forget. It’s usually better to have an automated system mail them at regular intervals. Your goal in sending a course is simple: you gain additional contacts with him. He requests these contacts.

Assume in everything you do on your retail sales site that your number-one assignment is to get his e-mail address. If he leaves your site without having identified himself, your site has failed to achieve its most important goal.

It’s nice to make a sale on your site from a first- time visitor. It’s also incredibly rare. Don’t try. Get him to order a free report.

For more tips go to
“Powerful Internet Marketing Solutions for your business!”

I always look at websites as marketing tools to achieve very specific and quantifiable goals, and these will certainly increase your figures, if you are not already doing these on your website.

Add Working Business Number on the Website
How many people do you think went through your website and had the urge to immediately get more information by simply picking up the phone and calling you?

Believe it or not, a lot of business websites make the mistake of not putting a working phone number, or do have a number on it but routes to a voice mail box or a facsimile machine. Not a lot of people like to leave voice messages on the first contact, and for those that do, they are no longer hot leads or “hot” about your product when you call them back later. Of course, I do not need to elaborate on how annoying it is to get a fax tone instead of a human voice ready to answer your inquiries.

This just happened very recently to me, I wanted to take the family out to dinner at this restaurant I have been hearing good things about but have never been to. So I searched for their website on Google to find out about reservations; I did find their website and found their number. I called a total of three times and each time, I always got a FAX machine. I gave up and dialed another restaurant and made my reservation. So here is a question; how much business do you think that restaurant is losing from calls from potential customers who get a FAX tone?

Add Simple Contact Form on the Website
Yes contact forms are much better than simply putting your email address on your website in text form. This is because if you put your email address in text format, it is going to get harvested by SPAM bots then you are going to get spammed with all these PPC crap… by PPC I mean porn, pills and casinos.

I notice that a lot of websites have complicated contact forms with too much information to fill in. You want to make things easy for your visitors, so try to keep your contact form to just the name, email address and the inquiry. If you have a product whose audience might be open to providing a phone number, then go for it. The idea is, to make sure your visitors are comfortable about contacting you and that they do so knowing their information is safe. Typically name, email address and inquiry box is sufficient, but what I would suggest is run a test, and do a split test on the contact form, one with and the other without a call back number. That way you are able to see which one is more effective.

It is also important that you reply to them withing a reasonable amount of time. It is ideally best to include a notice near the contact form indicating that, “their personal information is safe with you and that this data will not be sold to other parties or used for other purposes” and “state the amount of time you are likely able to get back to them”. If you say you can get back to them in two business days, strive to get back to them in less and not more.

I do a lot inquiring about products and services online, and let me tell you, a lot of them do not reply on time and by the time they do, I had already contact and given the business to someone else. Again the question is; how much business are the late repliers losing to those who promptly address inquiries?

Prepare a Script and Bonus or One Time Offer
By this I mean, you should have a set of ready made answers to questions you already know you will get asked, whether it is on the phone or through email. Always sound prepared because it makes you sound like you do know what you are talking about, even if you did know what you were talking about but fumble about in your answers, that does not make a good impression.

Always END with a quick action bonus or one time offer, tell them that you happen to have a special promotion on going, then tell them about the offer. If you are selling one specific product or service, then the special offer must be about the service. Otherwise if you carry a variety of products or services, the offer must be specific to the product/service the person is inquiring about. You are going to significantly increase conversions by offering them additional value to a purchase if they act within a specific time. You can also offer them membership to your newsletter if you have one. Newsletters are great ways to not only deliver useful information to your subscribers but is also a way of building on that rapport you have with them and warming them up to your product/service. Marketing is about relationships, and the decision to purchase from someone is in part influenced by the amount of trust a potential buyer has on the seller.

Put these critical elements into your website and into your website marketing mix and you will certainly see an increase in conversions.

Image Source: www.onlinebusinesstips.com

is a helpful free tool from Google that allows you to easily identify websites are the most likely to attract your target audience and is especially useful when you plan to purchase advertising or banner ad space on other websites.

My first online marketing related job was as an Online Media Buyer position and what I did was manually find websites that would be ideal to put banner ads on; scour the search engines using certain keywords and make an extensive list on a spreadsheet with all the sites and their Alexa rankings; note what type of ads they had and their sizes and locations on a page; then contact and negotiate rates. Part of the correspondence involved asking them about their traffic, getting information about their visitors such as demographics. Sometimes you get glossed up information, that you would be unable to verify. It would have been good at the time to have another website that had data on a website’s traffic.

Today, Google Ad Planner makes research easier. It enables you to define audiences by demographics and interests and through that information, create media plans that would reflect your audience’s online behavior and identify the right websites to place his/her advertisements.

Here is a video that gives you a quick overview of Google Ad Planner.

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.

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.

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.

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.