On-line Advertising

To promote your business on the web you can place advertisements on Google, Facebook, Instagram etc to good effect. The methods are fundamentally the same in that you pay for exposure to a large on-line audience, however there are differences that you should be aware of in order to make the best choice for your business.

Think of the Google Ads audience as someone looking for something specific identified by the key words entered into the search window whereas the social media audience is more of a casual browser who might just pop in to your site if they see something of interest to them pop up on their Facebook timeline. From the perspective of your business the Google Audience is far more likely to follow through with an active visit to your site however the audience of social media circles can be much, much larger and may be regarded more akin to traditional ads in the printed media. For the remainder of this article we will discuss Google Ads with Facebook / Instagram Ads being covered in the following post.

Facebook Ads

Google Ads

Google Ads are the listings that appear at the top and bottom of a Google Search, currently the dominant search engine in use by a long way.

In the above search for art galleries Limerick you can see 4 ads with little green square markers appear at the top, with the mapped google business registered group below, followed by the ‘organic’ google search results that you pay your web designer to get your site as close to the top as possible.

Things to note here are

The pictured Ad placement on the right looks good on widescreen but will disappear to the bottom on mobile screens. (what devices do your audience use knowing that in general something like 70% of web traffic is via mobile devices)
Experienced web browsers typically ignore these Ads 90% of the time while inexperienced browsers ignore them 70% of the time.
This is largely because the Ads are less likely to provide what you are looking for

The keywords are selected by the advertiser and don’t necessarily match well with the content.
If the advertiser pays more they can get to the top of the list.

The example above highlights this perfectly with not one of the four websites being related to an art gallery within Limerick.

To join the top 4 positions, Google Ads effectively opens a bidding war such that for any given grouping of words you compete with other companies for these slots….with a further 3 slots appearing at the bottom of the search page.

Every business has it’s own needs from advertising! For some this visibility on a search page , especially if the ‘organic’ search ranking is poor, may be reward enough and the costs dependent on the keywords selected can be quite low….typically charged per thousand ‘Impressions‘ or Search Page Appearances.

For others the Click Through Rate, the %ge of viewers who access your website from the Ad, may be all that you care about and though the cost is significantly higher it may still meet your business objectives.

It is also possible to make a payment to Google based solely on the number of people who visit your website and avail of your service or make a purchase from your business. These are known as Conversions the details of which you can specify for each individual ad.

To make things easy…and relatively safe …for all concerned you can do some predictive research work on the best keywords to chose and the relative costs of getting to the top of the list for each of the above methods. In addition you can identify a rate and a total or daily budget such that the Ad is pulled after your budget has been consumed. This means you can have great control and flexibility with your ad placements with highly visible feedback of results routinely available.

There are many ways to look at the results of your ad campaigns. It makes no sense to try and cover these in this article , suffice to say, that you will be able to clearly identify the success of your Ad Campaign in delivering new business opportunities.

What should be clear by now is that, though on-line advertising is very accessible it will demand some time and effort on an ongoing basis to get the best return, as you and your competitors vie for business. However if you get it right the rewards of course can be enormous and we will gladly guide you through the apparent complexity to allow you to focus in on what you know and do best….running your business.

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