Lesson 3: Understanding Advertising Online

In the previous post, I talked about the first important step that makes or breaks a web store, and that is growing traffic and increasing visitors to the store.

One of the most commonly used tactic is SEM also known as Search Engine Marketing. According to the people of Wikipedia, search engine marketing is the marketing and promotion of your web store centered around the search engines. (i.e. making your webpages more visible in the search engines result pages) These marketing methods can include SEO and paid advertising like ad placements, paid inclusions and contextual advertising.


The SEO Effect

One of the buzz words that comes to mind when we talk about traffic growing is SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization. This is a very commonly employed tactic and is considered a "must-have" when building any web store or website.

The motivation behind SEO is to ensure that your site's links would appear in search results when users are searching for content or information that is related to what you've posted on your site's pages.

In other words..

Let's say you've posted a product called "Beautiful White Wood Patio Lounge Chair" on your web store. If there are people searching for "white lounge chairs" or "wooden lounge chairs" or "wooden patio furniture", you'd want your website's pages to appear in their search results since its relevant.

Sounds easy right? Well, unless you know HTML programming and how a search engine indexes web pages, you might have to end up hiring someone who does. But even though this may cost you, it would only be a one time cost that you'd spend when first creating your web store.

Paid Advertising

This is a web marketing tactic almost everyone's familiar with. Paying for advertising space. Its the same thing you'd do if you were running a brick and mortar store.

However, in order to get the most bang out of your buck, its necessary to put some consideration into the following areas:

- Target Audience
We all know that if you're going to advertise anywhere, it has to be a place that has high traffic. That way, higher number of views might translate to a higher number of customers. But in the web world, its not a matter of how many people see your ad, but rather how many people who are interested in what you're offering might see your ad.

If you're selling furniture, you're better off advertising in a renovation forum as compared to a gaming forum, since its more likely that people who are renovating their homes would be interested in purchasing new furniture and more likely to visit your web store.

Putting some thought into identifying what sorts of people would be interested in visiting your web store will make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your advertisement.

- Advertising Costs
As much as its a fantastic idea to advertise your furniture web store in a popular renovation forum, if its going to cost you too much, its going to cost you too much.

Advertising costs is one of the many components that will make up a part of your monthly expenditure for your webstore. And ensuring that it doesn't eat too much into that expenditure will be important for you if you want to be profitable.

The good thing about advertising on the web is that there are a lot of different kinds of adverts you can post.. and they have different price tags attached to them.

Make out an advertising budget for yourself if you haven't. Once you've identified what are the sites your target audiences usually visit, you can request for a list of the advertising options these sites provide and the cost associated with it. Selecting a reasonable one that works within your budget is best. Don't forget that you can still choose a different advertising method later on if the one you've chosen now isn't effective enough. Which brings me to my next point...

- Effective Reach
 An ad is only as effective as its ability to reach people.

By now you must be thinking

"I'm already advertising on sites my target audience visits, and the banner ads I wanted are too expensive so I'm working with text ads now.. what more does she want???"

Be smart about online advertising. Calculating how effective your ads are converting into sales for you is very important. Some web store owners like to advertise their websites in a few places using various advertising options. But knowing which advertising options are converting into sales for you can help you redirect your resources so you're investing in the ads that are giving you the most effective reach.

Set up a Google Analytics account for your website. Google Analytics is a free tool that web store owners can use to track the number of visitors, page views as well as source of traffic to your website. It can help you understand how your visitors are reaching your web store and what they are looking at when they're there.

Stay tuned to our next lesson as we discuss a little more on what are the important metrics in helping you to measure the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.