Marketing Comparison

Marketing Comparison

Profile 1:

So you’re thinking of doing some online advertising to drive traffic to your Web site – good idea! It’s the new way to advertise and gain new supporters. Forget billboards in Times Square or commercials during the Super Bowl; using online text ads to promote your organization is extremely affordable (usually $5 to get started) and simple.

Since you’re going to start advertising online somewhere, it’s kind of nice to get some free advertising money to play around with. On Google, the most free advertising money offer I’ve seen is $50.

Google Adwords offer a nice little feature that displays lots of keywords for you when you enter a few basic words about your organization. This eliminates the thinkingneeded to come up with search terms that people would normally use to find your Web site.

Google AdWords lets you add an unlimited (or at least I haven’t found a limit) number of keywords to an ad group. Yahoo! limits you to 50 — a major negative.

It’s vital to know who is searching for what keywords and who clicks on which ads. Google AdWords stats are in real time,

Google AdWords accumulates your advertising clicks, then bills your credit card once a

month. This makes for easy accounting (especially if you have to run this expense by your board of directors).

Profile 2:

Compare proposition on advertising in Vanity Fair magazine vs Google: Vanity fair has circulation of around 1 million, and a full-page ad for a Prada bag costs around $100,000. So that ad in Vanity Fair costs 10¢ per impression. How about paying about 20¢ per impression for a link to a Web site where you can buy the bag? In truth, Vanity Fair's ad is cheaper per impression if you measure by the magazine's tota...

... middle of paper ...

...oogle a list of search terms it wants to bid for, along with the maximum bid it is willing to make for each term. For example, it might tell Google that it wants to display an ad on results pages for the search term "invest" and that it's willing to bid as much as $100. Google would then look at the bids from all companies that want to advertise on the word and rank them according to their final bid, with the highest bidder at the top of the list. But that's only half the equation: Google also factors in an ad's actual click-through rate, the percentage of times users who draw the ad on a search-results page actually click on it. "It's a complicated process, one that requires us to analyze which search terms are most relevant," says Frenchman. "We use real-time reporting to track people as they click on a keyword to a 'landing page' and then to an online application."