What’s the Deal with Paid Advertising?
Simply put, Paid Advertising is an online marketing method where businesses pay for increased exposure in order to boost website traffic and sales. This is often done by bidding for the top rankings on a search engine’s results page or targeting specific demographics or desired actions through social media.
Why Pay For Ads Online?
Two words: speed and control. Rather than slowly building your reach organically, Paid Advertising can get your product or service in front of a lot of people in a short amount of time. More specifically, it gets your ad to the right people.
In the old days of advertising, a business would pay for a billboard, radio spot, or television commercial and hope that their ad would reach the target demographic and convert to sales. While there was some strategy to running these ads (beer commercials on game day, for example) it pales in comparison to what you can do with Paid Advertising online.
Sites like Google AdWords and Facebook come with a multitude of filters and targeting options that allow you to market your product or service directly to potential customers or clients. You can specify who sees your ad by age, sex, or geographic location. Facebook takes this a step further and allows you to narrow your targeted audience by specific interests, life events, and political affiliation. This makes paid advertising extremely effective for niche markets, local businesses, and campaign/issue based organizations.
If I want to pitch my product to men ages 40-65 that live in Central Alabama and hunt turkey with a bow, I can, and if I’m running a truly effective Paid Ad campaign, I can find out when that specific demographic is most likely to be searching the web and have my ad run at only those times.
How It Works
There are a lot of options when it comes to pursuing a Paid Ad campaign, so in order to determine the right path for your business, you’ll need to answer a few questions.
- What is your goal?
- Who are you trying to reach?
- What is your budget?
You’re paying for either actions or visibility. If you’re selling a product or service, you’re going to want to focus your attention on clicks and conversions. However, if you’re promoting a cause or event, you’ll probably want to be more concerned with impressions. Another benefit of Paid Advertising is that it allows you to control exactly how much you spend and when you spend it. You can set a daily budget with a fixed amount that will run for a pre-determined length of time, or you can set a lifetime budget that will fund your ad until the money runs out.
There are a number of determining factors that will help you make a decision on what platform and what type of ad will be best for your business. If you’re working with a small, limited budget, or attempting to reach a specific demographic, then paid ads through social sites like Facebook and Twitter are more likely to produce the best results. If you’d rather target specific keywords, then chances are you’ll get better results with a Paid Ad platform like AdWords. This route is better suited for larger budgets, however, due heavier traffic and increased competition. High-value keywords that attract a lot of users will carry a hefty price tag.
Will It Work?
The numbers certainly seem to favor Paid Advertising. Today, 81% of users find a website through a search engine, and sponsored results account for 64.6% of the clicks on a results page. With social media, paid ads have been shown to immediately increase a page’s reach by the thousands.
In 2013, searchenginewatch.com published a case study on their blog that measured the actual impact of a well-executed Paid Ad campaign. The study followed a B2B ecommerce advertiser who launched a new site using Paid Advertising to boost sales. Results showed a 17% increase in site traffic and an incredible 136% increase in sales. Even more, sales immediately began to drop once the campaign was paused.
Still, Paid Advertising is not a magical one size fits all approach to marketing. Success hinges on strategic planning and smart execution. Whether or not it’s right for your business is entirely up to you, but with numbers like the ones above, it’s certainly worth considering.
