Advertising That Clicks With Customers
I’ve always wanted to build a better mousetrap to see if people really would beat a path to my door. My guess is they wouldn’t, unless I came up with a good way to market it.
The same is true with business Web sites. You can have a terrific product and promote it with a great Web site, but if no one knows about your site, then Web surfers won’t know to beat a path--or should I say, “click a link”--to your site.
That’s where online marketing and advertising come in. There are many ways to get the word out about your Web site and online business offerings. Prices for Web-based advertising range from free to, well, probably a lot more than you can afford.
One free form of advertising is to exchange links or banners with other Web sites. You can do this on your own if you know people who operate sites that are compatible with yours. While there’s no harm in doing that, that’s a hit-and-miss proposition.
Another option is to sign up with advertising banner link exchange services such as SmartAge or Microsoft’s LinkExchange.
SmartAge provides a variety of free and fee-based services for small businesses, including tools for building your own site and setting up an online store. The mainstay of the service is its free banner exchange.
You can use a graphics program to create your own ad banner, create one directly from the SmartAge site or use one of several free or low-cost ad banner creation tools that you can find on the site.
Once you have created a banner, you agree to display two other banners on your site in exchange for each banner SmartAge displays on other members’ sites. The reason that it’s not a one-to-one exchange is that SmartAge makes its money by selling those extra ad impressions to companies willing to pay for more exposure.
So some of the ads you’ll wind up displaying on your site will be free ads just like yours, and some may be ads that companies purchased from SmartAge. You can get a report of how many ads have been displayed on your page and how many of your ads have been displayed as well as how many times people have clicked on your ad (presumably to be taken to your site).
There is also breakdown information that shows how many times your ad has been seen on different types of Web sites representing different business segments.
One problem with this strategy is that you have no control over the advertising that appears on your site. SmartAge won’t post an ad for an “adults only” product or site, but it’s possible that it could post an ad for a competitor or another business that you don’t particularly want to endorse. Nevertheless, it’s a free and easy way to get the word out about your site and your products and services.
LinkExchange offers a service that’s very similar to SmartAge, but it also sells advertising space on Yahoo, Excite, its own site and other relatively high-traffic sites. Ad placements cost $100 for each 10,000 ad views.
For twice that price you can purchase targeted ad views on Yahoo where you get to choose the section of the service where your ad appears. The theory here is that people who are searching for Web sites or products such as yours are more likely to visit your site and patronize your business.
GoTo.com offers a very different strategy. The site, which claims to be “one of the top 10 search engines on the Internet,” functions pretty much as Yahoo and most other search engines do. In fact, it uses a search engine provided by Inktomi (https://www.inktomi.com) that is the same search engine used by Yahoo.
The search engine will find anything that matches a user’s key word, regardless of whether the site pays GoTo.com for advertising. However, paid listings are always displayed at the top of the list.
At first I was put off by the “payola” nature of the service, but GoTo.com is totally upfront about the way it operates, and it’s easy for users to know which sites paid to be listed on top and which came up simply because they met the search criteria. In fact, the user even sees how much the advertiser is paying for each click-through.
Businesses that want to advertise on GoTo.com open up an account with a minimum $25 deposit. You then tell the service which terms you want to be associated with. If you operate a mortgage company, for example, you might want your listing to come up when someone types in “real estate” or “loan” or “mortgage.” If you sell health products, you might want to buy the terms “health,” “medicine” or “healing.”
What’s interesting is that you decide how much you are willing to pay for each click-through. The more you pay, the higher you are on the list. If no one else is advertising around that search term (which you can determine by searching for it yourself), you can get the No. 1 position for 1 cent per click-through.
If it’s a popular term, like “computer,” you’d pay about $1.15 per click for top billing or less for lower billing. You could, for example, pay only a penny a click for the word “computing,” but you’d be No. 241 on the list, which means you probably wouldn’t get very many clicks.
On the other hand, the No. 1 listing for the less popular term “antique cars” pays 15 cents a click-through while the No. 6 listing pays only a penny. There are no monthly or minimum fees other than the $25 you deposit to open the account.
Money is deducted from your account whenever someone clicks on your links, which is a good thing if that person turns into a paying customer and not so good if he or she is just idly curious. Because you pay per click, you have an incentive to list your business only under relevant search terms and a financial disincentive to be listed in places that aren’t relevant.
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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”
