Analytics - Lincoln Marketing
An insightful man once said ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half’. That man was John Wanamaker, an american merchant who died in 1922. Almost a hundred years has passed and yet that very same statement rings true for a lot of advertising today.
What Mr Wanamaker would’ve been impressed with is the ability to see exactly what feedback and results his advertising was achieving; which is entirely possible even in realtime thanks to the advent of online advertising.
Pay-per-click (PPC), cost per impressions and affiliate marketing are all growing trends within advertising where you pay for results not just to place an advert like you would in the Lincolnshire Echo or Bailgate Independent.
Pay per click advertising is the process of being charged for your advert every time someone acts upon it. The simplest form of PPC is having a description with a link to your advert and then paying a set amount each and every time someone clicks on your link and views your website. Why this is such a fantastic form of advertising is quite obvious, you’re only paying for the advert when someone is interested enough to click the link and find out more.
Cost per impressions or CPM as it is often known is the model of paying for your advert based on how many people will view it in its location. So if you place your advert on a website with high amounts of traffic you will get lots of views or impressions and that will therefore cost you more than if it was in a location with less traffic. The benefit to this is that there is still a certain amount of strategy to paying for the advertising space. You might put a poster up in a coffee shop but you can’t measure how many people have looked at it, but put an advert in a prominent position on that coffee shops website and you will at least know how many people have looked at that page and paid accordingly.
Also mentioned was affiliate marketing, this takes advertising to the next step and is the equivalent of hiring commission only sales people for your company. Affiliate marketing is a model based on only paying for an advert when it leads to a sale of a product. The amount usually being a percentage of the sales price of the product bought. The concept here is great in that your advertising costs you nothing until you’ve made a sale, the downside is that you may be giving away far more of your profit margin than you would with more conventional marketing.
So if you think your advertising options are limited to handing out flyers on Lincoln’s high street or taking a half page in the Linconshire Echo then it would be well worth talking to us about looking at some new and innovative advertising strategies.
