The opportunity from the online world is clear - 18.3 million households in the UK last year had internet access. This is a new high of 70%, with 63% having broadband connections, up from 56% in 2008.
Over the last ten years online advertising has grown from £153 million to a staggering £3.54 billion (2009). The biggest gains coming from paid search, up 9.5% to £2.15 billion, and representing 61% of all online ad spend. There's certainly no shortage of impressive figures on the internet and its performance.
What there really is a shortage of for most small businesses is guidance on how to harness this audience, how to understand and master the complexities of online advertising and receive profitable web based traffic.
Small firms typically have limited marketing budgets and little/no in-house marketing resource. The options faced are either to appoint an advertising agency to manage campaigns on their behalf, or to attempt to advertise direct on Google and the networks.
Agencies come with the normal drawbacks of monthly agency fees (typically 15% to 20% of spend), a minimum term contract, and a lengthy briefing and set-up process. Attempting to run campaigns direct comes with even greater problems with the daunting number of network options and understanding the complexities of targeting and the various optimisation techniques.
Take Google Adwords. To be effective on Google you need to fully understand the Adwords functionality and how the optimisation algorithms behave. The lengthy list of variables to control and the fact that your competitors will be continually fighting for your ad space means you will have to dedicate resource each and every day to optimise your campaigns.
Variables include ad design, the keywords used, the negative keywords used, the Quality Scores of your ads, and the optimisation of your landing pages. You will need to run regular Google reports to understand and refine your keywords. You will need to run tests comparing different ad creatives, homepage versus deep page linking, different ad call to actions. You will need to undertstand the optimal settings for position of ad versus cost per click, and so on and so on.
The list is a long one and to be effective requires dedicated and skilled personnel managing your campaigns on a regular, daily basis. And I have only talked about Google. Running campaigns on networks is on a wholly higher level. Understanding the best networks to advertise on, the measures of success the various forms of targeting, the optimal size and design of ad are just a few of the issues to be condsidered.
So where can SMEs go?
I want to talk to you about a service that is changing the face of online advertising - Simply.com. Part of international advertising giant, Dada SpA, with over 35 million unique monthly visitors across its web properties, it provides a real and effective solution for online advertisers.
Simply.com is not an agency. There are no contracts, minimum periods or hidden costs. It is an online control panel that let's you set up and manage effective campaigns on either Google Adwords or Simply's proprietary network of premium publishers. Set up is extremely easy to use with campaigns set up in just minutes.
But what follows ‘behind-the-scenes' is some of the most sophisticated targeting and optimisation processes in the industry. Complex software combines and continually optimises campaigns using a mix contextual, yield and behavioural targeting. The result is highly relevant and convertible traffic at low cost.
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