How to Launch a Web Site
Step 5: Advertise Your Website
Web advertising is so different from all other types of advertising-- you can know exactly how effective your ads are. When you buy an ad in a magazine, you only know how many copies of the magazine were printed. You don't know how many people actually read the ad, how many were interested, or even how many actual customers found you via the ad.
With most web ads, you know how many times the ad is served to someone's browser, how many people clicked through on your ad, and in some cases, which purchases came from your ad.
There are a few different types of web advertising, and we'll cover a couple here.
Content-targeted Ads
All of the major search engines provide targeted "sponsor" ads along with the results of user search queries. These ads are usually very effective, since only ads which are related to the search query are displayed. The two most popular systems are Google Adwords and
Overture. Overture is now owned by Yahoo!, and their ads are served on Yahoo search results pages and other associates of Yahoo.
Both systems work in a similar fashion. To advertise with them you
- Create an account
- Create your ad text
- Identify key words with which to associate your ad
- Specify a bid of the most you would pay per click (i.e., how much you would pay every time someone clicks on your ad)
I always use Google Adwords for my ads. I chose Google over Overture for two reasons: Google is the most-used search engine, and Google's minimum bid per click is 5 cents compared to 10 cents for Overture.
One reason to choose Overture, however, is that they will allow advertisements which advocate against a person or organization. While Google would disallow an ad advocating the defeat of a particular presidential candidate, Overture would gladly accept it.
Google's Adwords site is actually very well-designed. They walk you through the process of registering and creating your ads, and provide helpful tools for identifying keywords and determining their likely effectiveness, hits, and cost.
They have detailed reports that help you monitor how well your ads are performing, and how much it is all costing.
I would suggest two things when using Adwords:
- As long as it will get you in the top ten positions when displayed, always set the maximum CPC (cost per click) to the minimum-allowed value: 5 cents. Why? Well, I've found that not being the first ad displayed is a good thing. The people who actually click through to your website when you are well down the list are people who are working a little harder to find what they want... they're more likely to be serious shoppers. Remember-- you don't just want people to click through-- you want them to buy something!
- Use the Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool to create as many search phrases as possible for your ad. If your ad is for Bike Rentals in Arizona, don't just use "Bicycle Rental Arizona". You want every possible combination that someone might enter into a search engine! For example:
- rent bike arizona
- rent bicycle arizona
- bike rental arizona
- bicycle rental arizona
- bicycle rental phoenix
- bike rental phoenix
- bike rental flagstaff
- ...
You get the idea.
Overture offers some very helpful tools for identifying search strings to use:
- Search Term Suggestion Tool
Give it a search string, and it tells you how many people searched for this string in the previous month, along with counts for many similar search terms. - View Bids Tool
Give it a search string, and it tells you how much other advertisers are already willing to pay per click for that search string.
Banner Ads
I'm not going waste a lot of time on this subject, because I believe that banner ads are a waste of time and money. They're similar to the search engine ads we've already discussed in the sense that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and hopefully your banner ads would be targeted to web sites with similar subject matter.
Banner ads don't work nearly as well as content-targeted ads because banner ads are always something the web surfer encounters while trying to read something else. On the other hand, when someone enters a query into a search engine, they're looking for something... and your ad might just be the thing they hope to find.
Consider these two scenarios:
- If I'm reading an article on the Boston Globe web site about the latest presidential debate, I'm not really looking for (nor interested in) the banner ad touting low mortgage rates.
- If I typed "mortgage refinancing" into Google, the Adwords ad offering low mortgage rates is exactly what I'm looking for!
The bottom line? In most cases, you can skip banner ads.
