Maximize ROI In An Increasingly Competitive Web World

In the late 90s, only a small portion of the business population really understood online advertising. During that time, businesses were just starting to develop and use their websites as a marketing tool to increase revenues and brand awareness. Online competition was scarce and paying $3.00 per click on Overture was unheard of. According to a recent survey published by eMarketer, paid search ad spending has grown dramatically during the first five years of this decade, rising from a mere $108.5 million in 2000 to 3.85 billion in 2004. As the competition gets more fierce, companies struggle to stay ahead and look for creative ways to maximize their ROI through website promotion strategies. For those businesses that are managing their search engine marketing campaigns in-house, the following issues may rise: 1) Larger search engines are getting too expensive to advertise on 2) There is a need for more targeted traffic to websites 3) There is a need for more local traffic to sites 4) Managing bids on a daily basis is too time consuming 5) Fraudulent click charges from competitors reduces ROI Larger Search Engines Are Too Expensive To Advertise On Have no fear - second and third-tier search engines are here. Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing may bring you tons of quality traffic but there are several search engines out there that can perform just as good, if not better. To name a few: www.kanoodle.com www.business.com There is a Need for More Targeted Traffic To Websites Businesses which are inexperienced in online marketing typically get wide-eyed and caught up in the numbers when setting up their keyword targeted campaigns. For one, they pick general keywords that have a high search volume but are not as targeted in definition. For example, if you run an online shoe store that specializes in women's designer shoes, select key phrases such as "womens designer shoes" or specific brand names like "womens puma shoes" instead of "shoes" or "womens shoes". If you happen to run an e-commerce site, a few good Pay for Performance advertising sites are Shopping.com (minimum CPC bid starts at .05 cents) and Yahoo! Shopping (ranges from 0.15 - $1.00 CPC bid depending on category). When searchers are looking for specific products, these two sites tend to show up a lot on the first page of some of the major search engines. Another way of getting targeted traffic to your site is through Contextual Advertising. Contextual ads are sponsored links that appear next to relevant, non-search-engine-generated content, such as news articles. The ads are delivered based on the content of a web page that's being viewed. A contextual ad system scans the text of a Web site for keywords and returns ads to the Web page based on what the user is viewing, through ads placed on the page. For example, if the user is viewing a site about finance, and the site uses contextual advertising, the user might see sponsored ads for finance-related companies, such as investment plans or stock options. A couple of search engines that provide contextual advertising solutions are: 1) Kanoodle.com - Calling their contextual ad program "ContextTarget", Kanoodle places ads on highly respected content sites like MSNBC.com, MarketWatch, USATODAY.com, NASCAR.com 2) Overture.com - Their ad program is called "Content Match." Your ads will appear on pages of their partner sites such as MSN.com, CNN.com and ESPN.com. There is a Need for More Local Traffic to Sites Several search engines have begun to provide local search matches to serve business owners. Last year, Overture launched Local Match, which allows advertisers to specify a list of keywords describing their services or products and then select the area they serve using a map. Overture's system shows their ads when searches are carried out that contain their keywords and locations that are within the area specified. To learn more visit www.atlasonepoint.com Blueliner Marketing, a full service marketing company specializing in Internet Marketing strategies including Search Engine Optimization, Online Advertising, Website Design, Online Public Relations and ROI Metrics.