There’s no denying that online advertising is proving to be a prominent form of advertising as we advance the technology we use. Everyone’s giving it a go, whether it is a novice dabbling with AdWords or an enterprise company outsourcing to a professional online advertising agency.

It doesn’t matter at which level your advertising knowledge is at, you’ll always need a solid foundation to your campaign that only you can build. So here are the 10 steps (some optional) to creating an online advertising campaign from the ground up!

Step 1: What do you want to achieve?

First and foremost, what do you want to achieve from your campaign? Are you looking to acquire leads (email addresses/contact information)? Do you want engagement with a particular page? Are you looking for sales? Brand awareness?

Whether you’re on your own or working in a huge marketing team, sit down all together and come up with a definitive plan of what you want to achieve and make sure everyone understands so there’s no room for error or confusion.

Step 2: Who is your target market?

‘Target market’ in this situation doesn’t just have to apply to a sales consumer, so not just someone who you’d like to buy your product. It means who do you want to see your ads?

What’s demographic? 16–25 year olds perhaps? Male or female (or both)? Sports fans? Social network users? New Yorkers?

Deciding on your target market is vital for an online advertising campaign because it can dictate where your ads should sit, which advertising services you should utilise etc.

Step 3: What’s the best way to reach them?

Next you need to decide how you’re going to reach your target market. Are you going to use ad platforms like Google AdWords and use search engines? Do you already have a contact list and want to use emails/newsletters? Fancy giving Facebook advertising a go if you’re targeting social networkers?

You could also decide on more traditional advertising and use banners or other kinds of creatives on industry specific sites like directories or blogs.

If you go down this route make sure you check with the site what data they can offer you as far as the demographic of visitors goes. It’s best just to double check that you’re putting your money in the right place.

Step 4: How much are you willing to spend?

Another biggy is deciding/agreeing on how much money you’re prepared to put into any campaign. Also decide on what variable you want to measure your campaign in and what price you’re willing to pay per instance.

If you’re going to track CPM (cost per 1.000 impressions) you need to work out how much 1,000 impressions are worth to you. The same applies to CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition).

Working out this kind of stuff tends to be slightly easier when you’re selling a product because you can work out your ROI for each sale against the cost of the entire campaign but with everything else, just make sure you stick to a realistic budget.

Step 5: How are you going to go about it?

This links back to Step 3 and is where you need to think, in more detail, about how you’re going to advertise. If you’re going with banners or creatives then put together a list of specific sites you think are relevant to your product/service.  Find out their pricing, how long campaigns run for, do they offer their own analytics service, etc.

This is more of a planning stage. You can hang around this point for a long time so don’t worry if it takes you a while to completely nail down a plan. If you’re still struggling then you can look at our guide on Which Method of Online Advertising is For You for an idea of costs and visibility.

Step 6: What action do you want your audience to undertake?

After you’ve agreed on your target market, costing, ad space etc. you need to decide which action your audience needs to undertake in order for you to achieve your goals.

So going back to Step 1: if you want leads, what needs to go on the page/in your ad in order for this to happen? How will your audience get from your ad to the action.

Be very specific about what action you want them to undertake. Always try and stick to one. There may be a couple of different actions available that could give you the same outcome but sticking to one not only gives your audience direction, it also makes it easier for you to track what’s going on.

Step 7: Design your landing page(s)

Based on the ideas from the last step, you now need to design your landing page or tweak your current pages to have some relevance to your ad.

Make sure your action is on there nice and clear and always make sure that your ad is relevant to the page. This is particularly important if you’re using ad platforms like Google AdWords or Microsoft’s adCenter (Bing) as the ranking (weight placed on your ad) is directly linked to how relevant your landing page is.

If you want some tips you can also check out this guide on 6 Steps to an Effective Landing Page.

Step 8 (Optional): Design your additional ads (Banners, creatives etc.)

This is optional depending on what kind of campaign you’re running. There are a lot of ad platforms that are just text based so obviously you don’t need to worry about graphics in this instance (Google and Bing can use text and/or graphics).

If you do want to use graphics then you can either design your own ads if you have the capabilities or you can outsource them to a designer for a cost, of course.

This is another step that you should spend some time on. It’s important that you’re sure on what your message is. Remember that ads are usually pretty small so you need to get in all the necessary information to entice viewers to click.

Always make sure your offer is in there and always try and include little perks if you offer them, like free shipping, buy one get one free etc.

Step 9: Run and track your campaign

Now, by this point you should be totally ready to launch your campaign. So go for it!

Remember that you’ll need to give it a few weeks, maybe even months, before you start seeing results (unless you’re running CPC/PPC then you should be able to see the number of clicks straight away).

After a while you’ll be able to get some feed back on the amount you’re spending in correlation to the engagement your ad is seeing, then you can start deciding on bits you want to change.

Step 10 (Kind of a Step 9 cont.): Track and test some more

Once you’ve decided on which elements of your ad to change you need to start Step 9 again (these two are kind of an infinite loop).

You should view any change you make as a new ad that needs to be tested from scratch again. After a few changes your campaign should have been refined enough that you’ll be seeing the kind of results you want.

If after a few changes you’re still really struggling to see engagement then it’s probably best to start the whole process again because you could have skipped out on a fundamental step earlier on.

Many people feel that the design of an advert; the effort and skill that goes into producing it as well as the aesthetics of it, is the most important factor when it comes to marketing products online.

While design is undoubtedly a vital part of online advertising, the substance behind it, (the content) is equally, if not more important. The design of your ad will grab your audience’s attention but it is your content that will pull them in.

Ad copy is, of course, completely subjective and although there are no strict rules as to how you should write your content, there are a basic number of questions you can ask yourself in order to get off to a confident start. (For the purpose of this guide, when I mention ‘ad copy’ I am referring to content in ads like Banners, PPC, text ads (Google AdWords) etc. not in depth copy such as product descriptions etc.)

What is your promotion/purpose?

It may go without saying but always have a purpose to your ads. Sit down and think of this before you even attempt to write your content.

You’ll be amazed at how hard it can be to write ad copy when you’re not entirely sure what you want the outcome to be. If you’re advertising through an outlet like Google AdWords or Microsoft’s adCenter it also makes it harder to choose keywords if you’re not sure who you want your audience to be.

If you have a particular promotion in mind you’ll know exactly which features to mention in your ad copy. Even if the purpose of your ad is to simply promote your entire website, it helps to firmly establish this and again it will help you with keyword targeting and content writing in general.

Who is your audience?

Following on from your promotion, the second factor that will help you when it comes to writing compelling ad copy is to have a firm idea of who your audience is.

Obviously, most businesses will know their general audience well and will have some insight into variables like buying habits, demographics, geography etc. However, your audience is something that needs to be considered with each advertising push as its very likely to change.

No matter how insubstantially, each promotion you run will lean towards a slightly different audience so just sitting down and having a quick think over that will help you determine what kind of language would be appropriate for your ads, as well as the kind of tone your writing needs to be.

What can you offer?

As I mentioned above, when I mention ad copy in this guide I’m referring to smaller, text based ads and the great thing about those is that they’re short. Short ad copy, although it may not seem it, can be extremely beneficial in that it forces you to become customer orientated.

As much as it can be helpful to send your customers to a ‘What we Do’ page full of self indulgent text about how amazing your company is, you simply don’t have the space for that with banners/text ads etc.

With ads like these ‘compelling ad copy’ is something that appeals to your audience, not something that entertains your marketing team’s journalistic side. Answer these questions; What can you offer THEM? How will THEY benefit from your product/service?

What is your Call to Action?

You’ll be hard done by to find a successful ad that doesn’t include a call to action. A quick Google of the word ‘advertising’ and I can already see ‘Get Started Today’, ‘Get Your Business Noticed’ ‘Start Earning the Revenue You Deserve’.

You’ll notice they’re not direct call to actions in the ‘Do It Now!’ sense; however it’s that persuasive language that needs to come into play with this element of your ad.

The trick to a persuasive call to action is to write something that each member of your audience can read and say “yeah! That applies to me.” I look at a call to action as a phrase/sentence that should get your audience excited.

I particularly like ‘Start Earning the Revenue You Deserve’ example mentioned above. I think it has the potential to instil a sense of motivation in an audience that not only pulls at their financial heart strings (“Start Earning the Revenue”) but also has a somewhat psychological impact as they’re convinced they “Deserve” the revenue.

Structure your Ad Copy

With text and banner ads you’re only likely to have 3 sentences, including your headline (4 at a push) so once you’ve asked yourself (and answered) all of the above questions you need to structure your ad.

Think about in which order you want to present certain information, which point do you want your audience to give most attention to? (this will likely be your headline). Do you need/want to include contact information? Which page do you want to send clicks to? (this is important for conversions). After your headline which is the most important bit of information?

Once you’ve given your ad a structure you can start testing your ad. Remember you can (usually) change the structure and content of your ad copy at any time during a campaign so if you decide certain text isn’t working for you then you can always switch it up.

Note: Read Other Ads

I’ve included this at the bottom because this point can really be slot in anywhere between the above questions if you get stuck. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking a look at other ads to shine a different light on the copywriting process. It goes without saying that I’m not encouraging you to steal their content but it can be helpful to look at the wording, the order in which the message is displayed, the length of the title etc.

The main reason that you definitely should not copy anyone else’s ad copy, irrelevant of that fact it’s near enough plagiarism, is that you don’t know if it works! The whole trick with writing ad copy is to find the combination of words, sentences, and headlines that work for you.

PPC advertising can take a while to get your head around if you’ve never had a go at it before, but once it clicks it can be one of the best steps in online advertising you’ll ever take.

It’s often better if you start out with a low cost PPC campaign as picking keywords, writing copy and correctly managing your analytics won’t always go right the first time, in fact it definitely wont. However, once you move on up to bigger and better campaigns you’ll start seeing just how valuable PPC can be.

There will always be risks in any form of paid online advertising, but as with most things, the risks can often be worth it. So here are some of the ways PPC can be beneficial to businesses.

Harness the Power of Google and Beyond…

Anyone will tell you that Google is one of but a handful of internet entities that holds sway in any internet wielding country. Google’s network of services and applications now attracts over 1 billion visitors a month (as of May 2011) meaning it has more potential for PPC customers than any other website in existence. So, if you’re a business looking for world wide exposure, Google’s AdWords is somewhat of a no brainer.

Of course, Google AdWords has an array of location and language targeting which can be extremely beneficial for physical retail stores. However, with business putting more and more emphasis on ecommerce it’s crucial to look at other PPC outlets as they can prove to be a sort of mini Google for their specific industries.

Online directories are a great example of this, sites like www.webhostdir.com or www.clouddir.com, which act specifically as vertical search platforms for the hosted services industry, can prove to be just as beneficial to this industry as Google does. Directories will nearly always offer a more targeted audience of buyers that usually would have made at least one or two clicks to get to your ad in the first place.

It’s sites like these, as well as Google, that make us believe that PPC advertising can be beneficial for any business, in an industry; and if you can master the art of combining the two, you’re on to a sure thing.

Show me the Money… or Not

Another great thing about PPC advertising is that it can be relatively simple to determine whether or not you’re your ad is working, and even better, if it’s not working it won’t necessarily cost you very much, if anything at all.

For Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) experts, tracking your PPC campaigns is as easy as ABC, but not everyone running a business or website has access to that kind of knowledge or can afford to pay the people that do.

For those of you who do need a helping hand, there are a variety of programs and tools around now that make tracking the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns simple. With Google AdWords you should probably be using Google Analytics which is designed with AdWords integration and is also free, which is handy if you’re just testing the waters and not looking to invest serious money.

If you’re running PPC through another outlet, like the directories example used above, then these sites will have their own PPC management systems and should update you on a regular basis. You should also always be in control of your own Cost per Click’s (CPC’s) and your daily maximum budgets etc. (unless you have opted for a managed PPC account then these will be agreed on with your account manager.)

Maximising these kinds of programs will (over time) start to give you a good idea of what different keywords and positions are working for you and will allow you to optimise your PPC campaigns to show you the highest possible Click Through Rate (CTR).

Get Social

Probably the biggest benefit to PPC advertising is the diversity of platforms for it. Social media sites have been the latest to jump on board with this idea and networks like Facebook.com, EBay.com and Amazon.com have started offering PPC advertising across their sites, targeting a huge array of potential customers.

As with all other PPC options, social media sites allow you to determine your audience by location, interests and age which can act as a solid advertising foundation for everyone from local businesses up to world famous fashion sites.

Scalability

Depending on how big your business/website is and how much effort you want to put into your PPC campaign, you could make PPC work on an extremely large scale.

With AdWords in particular Google make it very easy for you to run multiple campaigns at once, and of course you can set your maximum daily budget, maximum CPC’s, location, language etc for each individual one.

You can run up to 500 campaigns at once and target 3 million keywords (across all 500 campaigns), so if you really wanted to you could turn a significant percentage of your online marketing efforts to maximising your PPC’s.

It’s not recommended you do this solo, of course, and Google say that the majority of their AdWords users don’t ever hit 500 campaigns, but the sheer scalability of the program means you can easily adjust your SEM depending on your situation.

Go Direct to Directories

Elaborating on the directories point mentioned earlier on in the post, the most beneficial aspect of using directories for your PPC campaigns is that you’re almost guaranteed more qualified traffic than you’d get if you were using Google, for example.

The reason that directories work fantastically for PPC is that you’re already in the presence of qualified (potential) buyers who have, more often that not, landed on the directory from a specific and usually long-tailed, keyword (search query). Or even better, they’ve gone straight to the directory. This means they are already actively searching for the product/service you’re advertising.

Whether it be to research for the future or make a purchase right then and there, this type of visitor has shown a direct interest in your product/service and is far more beneficial to you than a visitor who has accidentally landed on the site. It’s vital to remember with PPC that although a high number of clicks may look good in your analytics, if the intent of the user is not there, clicks don’t mean anything.

Get Paid for PPC

Though it strays from the traditional pay per click route, there are some PPC variations that work almost in reverse of what you would expect. There are sites, Amazon being the biggest example, that will offer to pay you per click if you advertise a product of their on your site that is similar to your own.

Although reverse PPC like this wont bring you in shed loads of money, if you don’t mind advertising someone else’s product it can be a constant source of pocket change (as long as you can provide the traffic to generate the clicks).

Affordable and Scalable Marketing

There are literally hundreds of reasons why PPC is a great marketing investment; whether it be the ability to pause or change your ads at any time, almost instantaneous appearance and results for ads, or the fact that it allows for custom budgeting, PPC advertising can offer an affordable and scalable marketing solution for businesses of all sizes.

See also: Making the Most out of PPC Advertising

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but over recent months, Google has begun to make moves which bring back memories of MS in the late 90s. Lately I’ve felt very much like I’m living increasingly on the Google’s Animal Farm.

Conflict of Interest

Right at the top of my list would be their continued assault on vertical search and the obvious conflict of interest this represents. Sure I have a vested interest in all of this because my business is advertising, but this goes beyond all that. There is something inherently wrong with a business that lets others innovate and then simply copies in the case of Google Flights, or acquires in the case of Zagat. Worse still is when a company uses its existing monopoly to elevate their products above those of their competition. Do a search for “Maps” and none cynics among you will be shocked at the results. Anyone remember Mapquest? Apparently Google’s algorithm which lacks any human intervention (nudge nudge, wink wink) feels that they are no longer relevant. Depending on your location when reading this post, its quite probable that Bing Maps doesn’t even factor into the top 5 results either. But dont worry, Google Maps is here to save the day. Ranked number one, organically, for most map related searches you could care to mention.

Double Standards

I’ve been in the online advertising industry for almost 15 years, and in that time I’ve seen a lot of change. One of the most active areas of any online business is SEO. The complexity is ever increasing. As a business we pride ourselves on keeping pace with change within our industry, but the more recent SEO developments have given many of us pause for thought. The list of “commandments” issued by google makes one suspect there is another agenda at work beyond pure search and site usability.

Lets take the issue of duplicate content for example. A site whose whole purpose for being is to replicate content from other sites and order it in relevance, is telling us not to do the same? Apparently they consider pages that have content that share similar characteristics are less releveant to their visitors. This logic evidently doesnt apply to searches performed on their site of course. Search for any multituide for related terms around a topic of your choosing, and you will surely find pages that share results and content.

If that wasnt bad enough, one of the latest statements coming from the search giant now claims that sites with ad heavy pages could also be penalised in search results! (Reported by Search Engine Land) We are clearly dealing with a whole new level of hypocrisy. Yes thats right, a site which gets the bulk of its revenue by placing ads alongside duplicate content is telling us not to sell our own ad inventory (well not too much anyway). Oh, but lest we forget, their ads are super relevent to their users and of course everyone elses aren’t. So guess what Mr Camera review site, your ads for the latest Nikon just dont fill a need. But please, please Mr / Mrs publisher continue generating that content, because without it Google wont have anything to sell its own more relevent ads alongside in their search results.

Conclusion

At the heart of the problem for Google is the need to increase revenue. Simply put. Their goal to organise the worlds’ information is becoming increasingly overshadowed by the desire to increase profits, quarter on quarter. That internal conflict will continue to grow as the revenue numbers needed to be beaten become higher and higher. Adding 10% of growth to a $1M company is one thing but the maths get frightening when your talking about $40B-$50B company.  I’m not sure what or if there even is an easy solution to the problem, but as was the case with Microsoft in the 90s more and more businesses are turning to the law to act on their behalf.  I see this trend set to continue.

By James Ketchell

What is the goal of all forms of advertising? Branding, Sales, Education? The list is literally endless. It can however be simplified by one word that unifies everything. Action! All advertising has the goal of getting the viewer / listener / reader to take action. That action can of course take many different forms, from signing up for a newsletter, giving to a charity, or even making a purchase. Once we accept the goal of all advertising is essentially the same thing, it makes things much easier when we start to look at where best to place our advertising to generate our desired “ACTION”.

The placement options available to the budding marketeer are limited only by the imagination of the individual. So its little surprise that budgets are, more often than not, wasted. Conference Hotel room keys anyone? (Seriously I often wonder who has an ad budget so large they feel the need to test hotel key card demographics).

I’m all for testing new placements and new ideas as they develop, but the game hasn’t really changed in the last hundred years or so. Advertise where there is most “INTENT” to take our desired action. Got an airport car rental company? Guess what, advertising on airline booking sites on pages that cover your airports might be a good idea. Wedding photographer? Advertising on a local wedding planning site might work?

Seems obvious doesn’t it, yet so many companies ignore the obvious and instead chase the newest innovations. I love Peets Coffee, I mean seriously love Peets Coffee, but do I follow their twitter feed? No! But hey everyone needs a twitter account, right? This isn’t the time or place to get into social media and the misinterpretation of what is meant by marketing in that sphere. Hint: it’s not sponsored tweets.

Finding your niche

So where do we find intent? The simple answer is niche. Niche is where intent thrives. It’s important to remember, when people think niche, they generally think way too big. They confuse niche for market. There is a difference. A niche is a subset of a market. You need to think really small… Or perhaps more accurately focused.

Can you see where conflict might exist in a world which is dominated by comments like “Audience size is everything”, “Bigger is better”, “Who has the most market share wins”, and other such fairy tales? The smart marketeer doesn’t fall for this sort of media hype. The smart marketeer understands that all visitors are not alike. The key difference is? Yes you guessed it, INTENT!

What is intent?

Intent is the playing field leveller that no one wants to talk about. It’s far too easy to quote visitor numbers and membership statistics, why get into specifics which are potentially most useful to the marketeer?

Using the airline booking site as an example of niche. What is the intent of their typical visitor? I’m going to take a huge leap of faith and assume it’s the purchase of an airline ticket. Even if some visitors are searching on behalf of a relative or friend, they still represent that intent through a proxy. Its safe to assume a large percentage of visitors go on to purchase a ticket via that site (assuming the site in question represents a large enough cross section of the available marketplace).

Now let’s take another typical marketeer who’s focused on audience size and market share (see notes relating to airline booking site in the footer).

Our intrepid marketeer decides to mistakenly focus on market and not niche. Choosing to advertise on highly trafficked travel sites. People that travel after-all often rent cars don’t they?

In this rather obvious illustrative example, the intent of the travel site visitor is vastly different than one visiting an airline site. The list of intent for a travel site visitor is pretty much endless. Places to stay, where to eat, things to do, entertain the kids, etc.

Intent ratio

So let’s do some rather over simplified maths for a moment. Being generous lets say that 10% of people visiting a travel site have the intent of buying an airline ticket. Even if we completely ignore the geographical targeting offered by an airport booking site. That means we still need 10 visitors for every 1 booking site visitor to register the same level of intent.

In most industries the ratio of intent is vastly reduced the further you move away from the niche. Sure, TechCrunch and Mashable are incredibly useful sites for those keeping up with the latest technology developments. Their audience figures are in the millions and have legions of loyal fans. Those audience figures shrink dramatically however, once you apply an intent ratio to your product or service. Although you can safely assume most of their visitors are technically aware and most likely early adopters, how many are actually in the market for your product/service right at this moment? Generally as a rule, you would be lucky to get into single digit percentages.

So next time you read a headline about the latest hot app, platform, web site, [Insert here]. Ask yourself what’s the appropriate intent ratio to apply. That number will provide you with the first key metric to use when comparing rival placements. It’s the ultimate playing field leveller.

Note: OK so airline booking sites are a big easy example to use. Many of these sites represent the largest on the internet. So they actually fulfil audience and niche criteria. That’s unusual and only generally exists in a few search verticals. The others being retail, financial services and media / entertainment.

By James Ketchell