When Internet marketing specialists try to put together an online advertising plan for promoting their businesses (let it be B2B or B2C business), they usually take into consideration two Internet marketing strategies: direct response marketing and brand awareness.

Internet marketing can be used and benefited by any businesses to fulfill their direct response or branding objectives.  For example,

• An e-tailer with an e-commerce site and no brick and mortar business
• A small mom and pop business with a low budget
• An enterprise level company that plans to build brand awareness online

In the direct response world, a marketers goals is that the website visitors perform an action such as purchasing an item online, request a quote, fill in a contact us form, make a donation or sign up for a newsletter.  To measure the success of targeted Internet marketing plans, direct marketers need to measure, monitor and optimize various KPIs around conversion rate, cost per conversion (or cost-per-acquisition).

If the online advertising goal is branding, the strategy is usually built around raising awareness and increasing the visibility of products, services or causes.  To achieve the branding objectives, Internet Marketing agencies and consultants try to place their promotions and ads in front of as many people as possible within their target audience.

As I mentioned in my previous post, web marketers now can take advantage of Google Remarketing to retarget their audience to increase awareness around new product launches and sell new products and services online.

As I mentioned in my “to brand or to measure” post, regardless of what your internet marketing & advertising objectives are, you need to measure the success of your campaigns and keep optimizing them on an ongoing basis.

Display Ads were among the first form of online advertising. Since marketers started utilizing Internet as a platform for promoting their products/services, banner advertising became popular. The rational was that if they can target websites that attract the same audience as theirs, they can reach their target market through contextual advertising.

Banner ads have been traditionally priced on a CPM model. However, as visitors got more and more exposed to banner ads, they started developing banner blindness. As a result banner ads click-through rates (CTR) have been in decline. Low CTR rates on banner ads together with their CPM pricing models and traditionally low conversion rates has made them less attractive for direct marketers. Nevertheless, display advertising has been a popular choice for brand marketers as they have been able to benefit from the brand exposure banner ads generated for their brands.

With the market slowdown in the recent years, marketers have been urged to be more careful with their marketing dollars. As a result we were seeing a decline in the growth of web banner advertising as their effectiveness was under question.

When AdWords introduced Placement Targeting advertising, Google started changing the name of the game. There were two main benefits to Placement Targeting.

First, as an advertiser, you do not have to just stick to ad networks and commit yourself to the buy with no exact knowledge of where your ads were showing up and not being able to pull out of a site if it was not performing well for you. With Placement Targeting advertising, you can start with a small budget, hand pick the sites you would like your ads to show up on, monitor their performance, adjust your bids to control your exposure and stop running ads on websites that are not performing well.

Secondly, you do not have to stick to the CPM pricing model anymore as Google AdWords allows you run ads in AdSense content network on a CPC basis very much like search network. Running banner ads on a CPC model has made banner advertising much more cost effective. You can get a large number of impressions at a very low cost.

Of course there are some limitations to running Placement Targeting ads. You might not be able to get prominent ad placements on your favourite sites. The benefits ripped from CPC banner advertising by marketers is coming at the expense of web publishers as they see their ad revenue potentials are in decline on the Internet as more advertisers move to more cost effective CPC pricing model.

With more talks about the attribution models and the impact of display advertising on search engine marketing campaigns; it seems that banner advertising is getting a boost again. After acquiring DoubleClick, Google seems to push out various tools which help pump new blood into the display advertising industry.

Traditionally AdWords was providing conversion tracking based on the clicks on the banners. By introducing View-through conversion reporting, Google provided advertisers with the ability to track the indirect impact of banner ads.

Impact of Display Ads on Search Engine Marketing

Campaign Insights can provide data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign.

Recently, I volunteered to help the organizers of Tirgan Festival, a Persian event that will be held in Toronto (Harbourfront Centre) in July 17 – 20, 2008.

Tirgan festival presents Iranian art and culture through a four-day cultural festival in Toronto. The event makes a deliberate effort to include contributions from various ethnic groups in Iran in as many art forms as possible. Celebrating Tirgan will showcase internationally acclaimed as well as local artists and performers of Iranian descent, who celebrate Iranian heritage through music, dance, theater, cinema, literature, and visual arts. Tirgan festival also features Iranian cuisine and special arts and crafts presentations made available by vendor kiosks.

The festival offers both free and paid events. Persian events tickets and more information are available on the festival’s site.

Hope you join and enjoy all the event.

SEO Expert

Well, I started implementing RSS feeds to make it easiers for my viewers to get access to my Internet Marketing, SEO and SEM blog content. However, I thought what if some visitors are not yet familiar with RSS. How would they benefit from it? That is why I decided to post a short description on how RSS/Atom works.

What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to pull in news and information from across the Web. By adding a RSS feed to your RSS aggregator, you may get the latest news/articles directly on your desktop or on your My Yahoo page. With RSS feeds coming to you, you don’t have to visit each site individually.

What is RSS Reader?
You may read RSS (or Atom) files in a program called an aggregator, which collects news and articles from various sources. Bellow is a list of some of the most famous RSS aggregators:
FeedReader
NewsGator
SharpReader

How to get the RSS feed?
Click on Site Feed, grab the URL and paste it in your aggregator. Or Alternatively click on My Yahoo or My MSN buttons, log in to your My Yahoo or My MSN and click the Add Content link and insert the URL in the form and submit it.

What is Blogroll Me?
If you write a blog and would like to add a link to my site on your blog, just click the Blogroll Me link, log in to the service and add my blog to the list of your favorite sites.