Internet advertising without secrets

Paid online promotion - why you should be interested in online advertising?

Building a good website requires a lot of time and effort. It is necessary to create good design and text engaging users. The next stage is positioning and the fight for the highest place in search results. A high-quality website is a basis - there is no doubt about it and when deciding on paid activities you cannot neglect this aspect. 

All this may not be enough. The internet is a very competitive environment. Even the smallest companies promote their sites and it is increasingly difficult to stand out only with the help of high-quality website. That is why online advertising is practically a necessity today. 

What are the benefits of online advertising?

Online promotion is very popular due to several factors. These include:

Availability of product

Virtually anyone can carry out an online campaign. All you need is basic knowledge, which you will acquire, among others, from this article. The tools used to advertise on the internet are available for free, so it's worth trying your hand, even if you don't have experience yet.

Wide range 

Due to the fact that the Internet reaches people around the world, the campaign is not limited territorially. The message can be directed to users around the world.

In the case of traditional advertising, only the largest brands with multi-million budgets can reach global reach. In the case of the Internet, even the minimum resources give the opportunity to direct the message to recipients anywhere. 

The adequate territorial coverage is particularly important for niche products and services. Within one region or country, it is difficult to gather a group of clients that would allow making a profit. You can find a wide audience from around the world on the internet.

The ability to reach a specific group of recipients

Advertising on the internet minimizes the risk of sending an advertising message blindly. When planning a campaign online, you will specify exactly who you are targeting. This is called targeting. You can choose the recipients of your content based on various parameters. The most important ones are as follows:

 

Thanks to appropriate targeting, your offer will be seen by those who may be realistically interested in it. This will allow you to effectively use your advertising budget - you will not spend money reaching users for whom your offer will not be attractive. After all, if you advertise anti-wrinkle creams you won't want to sell them to 20-year-old men.

Low costs of goods

Advertising on the internet is still much cheaper than in traditional media. Due to the fact that it is easy to specify the target group here, even with a small scale of operations can quickly translate into real profits. 

Online activities are therefore a great solution at the beginning of your business. Even if you don't have a large budget, you can run an effective campaign that translates into increased profits. 

Flexibility 

After starting the "offline" campaign, making any changes or corrections is practically impossible. Things are very different with online activities. During the campaign, you can freely modify the content, add new advertising forms, and even change target groups. 

Where to get information on what you should change? Comments, likes or messages from social media users are valuable research material that will help you better understand your target audience.

Easy measurement of results

The results of traditional campaigns are difficult to measure. For online advertising, you have analytical tools at your disposal to help you thoroughly examine the results of your activities.

Thanks to this, you will not only learn about their effectiveness but also try new solutions. A / B tests are used for this. For example, you can create a new version of the page (version B) where you sell the product and direct some traffic to it. Thanks to this, you will compare its results with the results of the current version of the website (version B). This way you can check whether the changes you made have affected the results of the campaign.

 

Online Advertising

Although online advertising brings many benefits, it won't work anytime, anywhere. As with other solutions, they have several disadvantages. 

Some target groups are not present on the internet

For most of us, using the web is a part of everyday life. However, there are recipient groups that use the network rarely or not at all. These mainly include older people and those who live in areas with poor internet access (fortunately, there are not many people from the latter group). Reaching them through the internet is very difficult, if not impossible. 

Audiences often ignore online advertising

Websites are overloaded with ads. Messages attack users from all sides. That is why users in a sense have become resistant to the advertising message. 

One example of ignoring ads is the so-called banner blindness. Users' brains quickly recognize advertising banners on the page and ignore them when browsing the site. To prevent this phenomenon, special attention must be paid to the quality of the message and its adaptation to specific users. 

It should also be remembered that almost half of Internet users use ad-blocking programs such as the popular AdBlock. Therefore, in parallel with advertising activities, you should build user engagement and acquire organic (free) website traffic. 

For this purpose, social media and well-run content marketing. In both of these channels, you should pay attention to creating content that engages users. 

It's harder to get the user's attention

Internet advertising is usually just a small element on the page. What's more, users usually open several browser tabs simultaneously. 

Therefore, online advertising fights for attention with many other stimuli. That is why it is harder to attract and retain attention here. The message should, therefore, be refined in the smallest detail and really attractive to the recipient. It also affects SEO.

 

How does internet advertising work?

The main principle of online advertising is to tailor the message to a specific user. For this purpose, cookies are used primarily. A cookie is a string of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of the browser on your computer's hard disk so that the website can remember who you are.

The basic function of cookies is to facilitate the proper operation of websites. In addition, they are used for advertising purposes. It should be noted that cookies are not used to find specific users, but only devices from which they connect to the network. Based on the information collected in this way, it is possible to reach an appropriately defined target group with the advertising message. 

The owners of the websites on which the ads are placed are publishers. They are responsible for the content of websites, updating or moderation of user comments. 

Publishers offer space for advertising on their websites. They can do this directly or using specialized services such as Google AdSense. Intermediary websites deal with, among others, standardization of online advertising formats, acquiring customers for publishers and intermediation in payments. 

The cost of online advertising can be determined in several models. 

• CPA (cost per action) - cost for the user performing the desired action;
• CPC (cost per click) - payment depends on the number of clicks on the advertisement;
• CPL (cost per lead) - the cost is calculated on the basis of the number of leads obtained, i.e. data of potential customers;
• CPM (cost per mille) - cost per thousand ad impressions;
• CPO (cost per order) - payment for the order placed;
• CPS (cost per sale) - payment after purchase by the customer;
• CPV (cost per view) - here you pay for the number of views;
• PPC (pay per call) - the cost depends on the number of leads obtained, i.e. data of potential customers;
• PPI (pay per install) - payment for installing the application by the user (usually free, in which ads are displayed).
   

Forms of online advertising

Online advertising gives you the opportunity to reach recipients in many different ways. This makes it easy to find a solution that will suit your needs, budget and technical capabilities. 

What do GDN ads look like? You can choose from 4 formats:

• Flexible - they consist of many elements, such as headlines, photos and texts. Their appearance adapts to the site of a specific publisher. Google automatically optimizes them for performance.

• Graphic - these are materials in the form of banners containing HTML5 files or images;

• Engaging - is, as Google writes, attractive graphic and video ads on YouTube and the Display Network.

• In Gmail - materials appearing in user mailboxes of this system.

The main advantage of GDN is its wide reach - Google partners make up about 90% of websites. Competitive prices are also important. 

YouTube video advertising

 

These are, among others, advertising spots that appear before or during YouTube videos. They resemble commercials known to everyone from television. However, they have one advantage - you can put a link to the product page in them. hence, they allow the user to make a quick purchasing decision and allow you to easily measure the effectiveness of the campaign. 

YouTube offers 6 ad formats. 

• Display ads - visible on the right or below the video;

• Advertising overlays - they appear at the bottom of the movie playback window;

• Video ads that can be skipped after 5 seconds - you'll find them before the video, as well as during and after the video;

• non-skippable ads - they are located where the ads described in the section above, but the user must view them in full;

• Advertising banners - displayed for 6 seconds before the movie;

• Sponsored cards - they show content that is related to the film you have uploaded, usually products or services that you will present in it.

Video ads are often an alternative to television campaigns due to their low cost and long reach. They can also supplement it. 

Product Ads online

These are graphic and text messages that contain a photo of the product, its price and a brief description. They allow direct users to the offer page, thus shortening the path from displaying the advertisement to purchase. 

Facebook, Instagram, Audience network

Advertising on Facebook and its Instagram is the most popular form of social media marketing. Creating a profile on these websites is of course free. To reach a sufficiently large audience, you need marketing activities for which you must pay. 

Facebook users leave there a lot of data useful in targeting ads. These include not only age, gender or place of residence. Based on the profile data, you can specify your interests in great detail and, on this basis, 'shoot' into the right target group very precisely. 

Activities on Facebook and Instagram are not strictly sales. They are mainly used to build brand awareness and build a positive image. They also allow direct contact with the target group. Comments, likes, and messages are a valuable source of information about potential customers. Facebook advertising can have several forms.

Post promotion

This is a way to reach information from our company profile to a larger audience. By promoting the post, you make more users appear on the wall than with organic reach. 

Facebook adverts in online marketing

 

Using this form of online promotion is not so much about building a brand as it is directly increasing sales. You can put a link to the product sales page in the Facebook advertisement. Facebook offers many ad formats.

• The image

• The film

• A slide show in which you can place from 3 to 10 images or 1 movie;

• Carousel - here you can also place up to 10 images - each can have a separate link;

• Instant material - full-screen graphics that appears after clicking on an advertisement on a mobile device;

Collection - the material that appears when the user interacts with the instant material. You can present many products here.

Automation of marketing activities on Facebook

Facebook offers many useful options for automating marketing activities. The basic tool used for this is Facebook Pixel, which examines the activities of users on the site.

Information from pixel allows you to, among others, reach new recipients. Facebook's algorithms will examine the profiles of people similar to your existing customers and allow you to reach them with an advertising message.

Thanks to data from Pixel, you can also conduct remarketing (which you will read more about later in the text).

Ads in Insta Stories

Insta stories quickly gained great popularity among Instagram users. For some of them they replaced Snapchat. 

Instagram news feed ads

Instagram also offers news feed advertising. As with Facebook, many formats are available - photos, carousels, collections or content in the Explore section. 

Audience network

Audience network is a service that allows you to place an advertising film on the pages of publishers cooperating with Facebook. The number of such entities is limited and they are carefully selected and verified by Facebook. 

Due to the fact that users can see your content on more platforms, they more often decide to use your offer. Facebook boasts that when using Audience Network, the conversion rate is up to 8 times higher than in the case of promotions only on Mark Zuckerberg's website. 

Banner advertising

Banners are graphic and text ads, sometimes they also contain animations. These are elements that clearly stand out on the background of the page. Depending on the website on which they are displayed, banners may have different formats.

After clicking the banner, the user is taken to the landing page. There, he can make a purchase, download an e-book, subscribe to the mailing list, or perform any other action you want

Space for banners can be bought in 3 ways. First, using the Google and Audience Network Facebook networks described above. Secondly, directly from the publisher. Third, using one of the RTB platforms.

RTB (Real Time Bidding) are shopping platforms on which advertisers compete for advertising space in real-time auctions. To bid, you must specify the maximum bid you can pay to display the ad to the user. If your offer turns out to be higher than the competition - you win. 

Banner advertising, like email marketing, has been around for a long time. The first internet banners appeared in the 1990s. Also in this case you hear about the imminent death of this type of advertising. However, it turns out that good banners can still attract users and can prove to be an effective weapon in the fight for potential customers.

Remarketing - how to activate users?

Remarketing consists of displaying ads to users who have already familiarized yourself with your offer, but have not used it and directing them to people who have already found your offer and who have not used it, and those who can re-use it. 

How do we know that a given user already knows your offer? To obtain such information, the above-mentioned cookies and relevant codes on websites that signal groups of such users are used.

It is worth creating messages targeted specifically at these groups of recipients. People initially interested in the offer are much more likely to use it later than users who reach it for the first time. 

Email is often used for remarketing because recipients often leave their addresses during the purchasing process. You can also use personalized banners or ads on Facebook. 

Effective remarketing tools include rebates and other special offers. In the latter case, it is a good idea to offer a complimentary product. For example, a user who bought a bike may be offered a water bottle or a set of keys. 

Campaigns on the Internet - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Creating an effective online campaign is not an easy task, especially for those who are taking their first steps in internet marketing. You need to pay attention to many factors that affect the effectiveness of marketing activities. 

High-quality creations

The basis of an effective campaign is the right message. It should be above all simple and clear. Content should be as short and specific as possible. Thousands of companies are fighting for the user, so you have little time to draw their attention. Don't waste it on providing useful information.

Graphic designs should also be as simple as possible. Focus on visualizing the product or service. 

Selection of the medium 

After creating the creation, it's time to put them in the right context. The place where you place your ad will depend on your audience.

As we mentioned above, the Internet offers wide opportunities to target the message to specific groups. It is worth remembering at the stage of planning the campaign.

Monitoring of effectiveness

After starting the campaign, it's time to measure its effectiveness. This is a very important stage. It allows you to determine what activities are profitable and what is better to give up. 

Making modifications

Thanks to good analysis, you can make changes and improve campaign performance. This is a very important activity that will help you avoid losses caused by ineffective actions. 

How to measure campaign effectiveness?

An effective campaign is, of course, one that brings profit. How to check the effectiveness of actions? Depending on your goals, you can explore different parameters, for example: 

• number of new customers

• number of leads obtained

• number of clicks on the banner

• registration of new users

You can check the campaign results using the tools you use to run your campaign. A popular solution that can provide additional information is Google Analytics. Is a free program that allows you to study website traffic. The range of available functions is very wide. 

Google Analytics, i.e. the ABC of campaign results analysis

Thanks to Google Analytics you will find out, among others, where the website traffic comes from, which geographical region the users come from or how they behave on the website (how long the session lasts, which web pages are visited and when users leave the website). 

Based on this information, you can create reports that help you understand the behavior of site users and adapt it to their needs. 

Conclusion on internet advertising

Advertising activities are necessary if you want to promote your website, product or service. Advertising on the Internet allows you to reach a specific group of recipients, it is not usually associated with high costs and its effectiveness is easy to measure. 

There are many forms of online advertising - from banners popular in the 90s to ads on social media. The choice is really wide. 

Carrying out a good campaign on the Internet is primarily a specific message, choosing the right place for publication and making changes based on the analysis of the results, which you will use using Google Analytics. 

Thanks to good creations, appropriate message targeting, analysis of actions and making corrections you will be able to create a campaign that will bring measurable benefits.  

You don't need to hire external partners to run advertising activities on the web. Using, among others, the information from our guide, you will create your first campaign yourself.  Also, entities providing tools for creating advertisements on the Internet. Google or Facebook and many others place the most important information in their knowledge bases. 

It is undoubtedly worth trying your hand at online advertising. Test different solutions and examine the results. Remember that practice makes perfect and in time you will be able to create a really successful campaign. Let’s do it!