Effectively Using Pay Per Click & Banner Adverts
Posted: February 14th, 2008
Pay per click advertising has become a staple in most online advertising strategies over the past few years, with the growing use of search engines for looking up just about anything. All the while, banner advertising has been cast aside and deemed ineffective simply because no one clicks on them anymore. Unfortunately, the purpose of display advertising is misunderstood and its effectiveness undermined.
The fact is that banners can serve well in pushing a brand, product and service into a customer’s subconscious. Search marketers also seem to forget that display advertising existed long before the Internet was born, and the terms CPM, “above the fold”, etc all originate from the offline print world.
So let’s see how we can effectively integrate banner advertising with our beloved metric-centric (it rhymes!) pay per click campaigns.
Case Study: The SEP Flower Shop
All throughout the year we would purchase a variety of IAB-compliant banners on relevant sites, and not so relevant ones if we can get a good deal. We’ll strive to achieve good placement on sites related to flowers, confections, or just gifts in general. Even though we aren’t likely to generate a lot of direct traffic via click-throughs, the “SEP Flowers” brand is seeping into potential customers’ heads, and they are unknowingly becoming familiar and comfortable with us.
Now January rolls around and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. Time to bulk up on our pay per click budget and get some serious leads and sales. Of course at this time all the competing flower shops have done the same and the paid links section is completely saturated with ads from random unheard-of flower shops.
Not to worry, we will prominently display “SEP Flowers” in the headline of our ad copy and we’ll get an influx of visitors as all the other flower websites do at this time. The difference is that more people have already (unknowingly) developed an affinity to our brand, are more likely to click on an ad that says “SEP Flowers”, and are more likely to make that purchase on our site.
January and early February is also a good time to decrease our spending on banner adverts to augment our pay per click budget. This time of the year is when a high number of sales will be made and sealing the deal takes precedent.
I used the SEP Flower Shop as just a timely example, but the same banner/pay-per-click spending cycle can be applied to other verticals too. For example: ice cream shops in the summer; restaurants for Mother’s Day and; vacation packages for the winter break.
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