The most important aspect to any marketing campaign is your return on investment.  If you’re spending money to market your product or service you want to get as much of a return back as possible.  The good thing is that online marketing is incredibly cost effective.  The ROI from an Internet marketing campaign exceeds that of many other forms of marketing.

With pay-per-click marketing campaigns, you only pay when someone actually visits your website.  Unlike print, radio, television or direct mail advertisements, you don’t pay when people ignore your ad or simply glance at it.  You don’t pay for unrelated traffic either.   When you participate in a pay-per-click advertising campaign, your ad is only displayed when someone searches for terms related to your website.  You’re getting targeted traffic.

Pay-per-click advertising campaigns only reach customers that are actually searching for your industry.  Rather than telling people what they want, you are approaching people that are already interested in your industry.  Once someone types a related phrase into a search engine, they are already much more likely to be interested in your website than a passive user looking at an unrelated ad.  People searching online are actively looking for information and those searching for products and services are likely doing so with the intent to purchase.  This is the best possible time to advertise.

What you end up with are qualified customers that are willing to spend and you only pay when one of those customers makes the decision to visit your website.  The visitors you end up paying for are much, much more likely to be interested in your company and your chance of making a sale will be much greater.

Another positive aspect of online marketing is that it is very easy to monitor your return on investment.  If you mail out fliers, there really isn’t any way to know how many people throw them away.  There also isn’t a way to know exactly how many people read your print ad or pay attention to your television or radio commercial.  Yes, you can estimate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by watching for any increases in business following one, but there is now way to know with 100% certainty.

With pay-per-click online advertising, you know exactly how many people click your ads and visit your site.  Using website analytics in conjunction with advertising, you know how many of those visitors stay on your site and for how long.  You can figure out exactly which keywords are performing well and which are not.  This sort of specific tracking isn’t possible with other forms of advertising.

Being able to track your website promotion and fine tune your efforts based on the data you receive is just another reason why online advertising is so cost effective and important.

Tags: Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Website Promotion