1 – Introduction and Benefits
In contrast to unpaid online marketing methods, such as search engine optimisation, paid online advertising refers to any website traffic source that you have to pay for. In today’s increasingly online marketplace, your website is basically analogous to a high-street storefront, and relevant website traffic serves as the lifeblood of your online endeavours. Without traffic, your online marketing efforts will fail utterly, and you’ll end up being left behind in an increasingly competitive business climate.
Paid and unpaid methods of advertising are both important, but they generally work independently of each another. Although unpaid methods such as business blogging, search engine optimisation and community building through social media all remain essential elements of online marketing success, paid advertising presents a number of benefits to businesses whose budgets are sufficient enough. Following are some of the key benefits of paid advertising:
Most paid advertising platforms are highly flexible, allowing you to set a daily budget that best suits the size and turnover of your business. Being a very versatile solution, paid advertising can grow seamlessly with your business.
Thanks to contextual ads and various other options, paid advertising allows you to increase your reach immeasurably, making it particularly valuable for startups and companies that have yet to establish a major online presence.
Contextual advertising allows you to target ads to the right kind of people. Having your ads targeted towards a specific audience means that you don’t waste money on showing them to those who are less likely to be interested.
Since you can set your own daily budget and choose from many different platforms, paid online advertising tends to be much more cost-effective than traditional methods. Ultimately, you pay for results.
Although every marketer has heard of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads among others, there are actually many more options available. This guide discusses the most important paid advertising models and platforms.
Thanks to the vast amount of data generated, tracking performance of paid advertising campaigns is much easier than it is with traditional methods, and most platforms provide a range of performance-tracking tools.
Organic search engine marketing, social media marketing and content marketing, though essential, take time to deliver results. By contrast, a well-executed paid advertising strategy will bring in results almost immediately.
The following chapters of this guide discuss the most important areas of paid online advertising as well as the platforms and methods you can use to generate traffic to your website or fulfil other marketing goals. However, before you start spending money on any kind of advertising, it is essential that you set your goals and define your target audience so that you can measure your success and target your advertising to the right people.
