Online advertising is a much different beast than you are used to with your traditional advertising media such as radio, newspaper, television and billboard. When advertising in your local paper, you can call up the paper, give them a rough idea of what you want the ad to say, perhaps send over a digitized copy of your logo and then just pay the bill. Your ads will run for however long you pay the exorbitant advertising charges, and if you’re lucky someone from your target demographic will see the ad and will convert to a paying customer. With a billboard, bus ad or radio ad, you simply state what you want in the ad, pay the advertising invoice and hope the phone rings.

The net results of these types of advertising campaigns are generally fewer dollars in your wallet and little new business to show for it.

Advertising online with text and banner ads on websites and search engines is much more effective, both in cost and performance. Your ads are specifically targeted to your desired demographics, and you can choose to pay either when someone clicks the ad (an interested prospect) or for “impressions” – a certain number of times the ad will be shown. The challenge with online advertising is that it is both time-consuming and very tricky to do correctly.

For instance, with search engine marketing alone there are a multitude of processes that need to happen before your ad can launch and successfully start drawing traffic to your website:

1) A campaign must be built on each major search engine (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you wish to advertise with.

2) For each campaign, ad groups must be built. Ad groups are a combination of keywords and ad copy that pair together to determine how and when your ads are shown.

3) For each ad group, specific keywords must be targeted (i.e. flower shop, vancouver florist, flowers in burnaby BC) that will trigger the ad to show when a search is executed for those keywords.  

4) For each ad group, the ads themselves must be designed. Ad copy generally includes a header (Need flowers for your wedding?), a couple of descriptive lines of text and then a link to your website.

5) Finally, budgets and demographics must be set to determine how much you want to spend on your ad, when it’s going to be shown, and who it’s going to be shown to.

6) As the campaign is running, split testing must be done to determine which ads and keywords are drawing eyes and clicks, and which are unprofitable. The unprofitable campaigns are dropped and the profitable ones are repeated and tuned for greater performance.

Phew. We’ll admit it – it’s a lengthy process to get even a single ad up. But – here’s the good news! Gravytrain will manage as much of your online advertising capability as you need. We are experienced in designing, building and executing online advertising campaigns on all of the major search engines and content networks.

You simply let us know what your target demographic and monthly budget is and we handle the rest. We’ll provide you with specific reporting that shows exactly which keywords and ads are performing for you, and we manage fine-tuning of your ads to ensure your budget is performing at the highest possible conversion rate. Gravytrain will continue to develop keyword and ad copy matches which will draw more and more traffic to your website and convert prospects into customers.

Click here to contact Gravytrain to discuss online advertising and how we will make it work for your business. It’s time to drop the expensive “old-school” methods that have next to no guaranteed results and start reaching out and converting your customers through the Internet.