Online Advertising and Internet Marketing Services

When advertising online you may choose to do it yourself thru Google adwords or Yahoo and Bing, or you may choose to have a third party manage it for you.  Advertising these days have changed dramatically.  When advertising on the yellowpages or TV, Radio, and newspapers you would have to take in account the audience that you were attempting to capture.  What Demographics you are looking for and who covers these areas the best.  After that you want to get the best bang for your buck.  These days your looking at advertising online.  Online search to be more specific rather then individual websites.  Google is Google, Yahoo is Yahoo, and Bing is Bing.  So now you have to consider if you are going to advertise on these search engines using Banners or Pay per click (PPC) thru Reachlocal , At&t, Yodle, Yellowbook360, and so forth remember that they all have access to the search engines.  So you really only need to consider a few different things.

Customer Service
  Having access to your account and their representative is very important, trends change and you may want to make quick changes to your advertising program.  You want your service to be proactive and reactive at the same time.  Changes to your text ads, target area, and keywords should be done quickly and having access to them is important.

Cost vs ROI
  These companies are charging different rates due to a number of variables.  But remember Google charges are no different Per Click if you go with Reachlocal orYodle or any other service including yourself.  Your cost per click will change according to your quality score and your bid price, a simple search on adwords will help you determine what your per click charge would be.  So you now have to wonder why One service wants me to pay $1000 per month or cycle and another service wants to charge $1500.  Well looking at what the keywords they are targeting is one way to look and another is the Geography that they are covering with this.  A flat fee per month is scary because if Google is able to get you $500 dollars worth of clicks in a month where is the remaining $500 of your monthly program going to?  Obviously to the service you are going with.  If your service is charging you on a cycle basis rather then monthly and Google is charging say $3 dollers per click and they are increasing the per click charge, now you have to see how much the service is increasing the per click charge and keeping for themselves.  Looking into this before making the decision to go with one of these services is important.  These companies don't do this service for free, and there is no issue with paying them to manage your online advertising, you just have to make sure that the cost is fair and that you are getting your moneys worth.   If your paying $1000 per month and only getting 5 or 6 calls there will be a problem, flat fee or cycle.  Again having access to your services representative to make changes and adjust your program will be important.  Doing this yourself may be the way to go, but now you need to factor how much is your time worth?  It works the same way as if you were installing a hot water heater, you can do it yourself for the cost of the hot water heater and parts.  Boom done.  But it may take you 5 hours to do it.  Paying a plumber $300 to do it for you may be worth it to you.
They will also have a better chance of doing it right the first time.

Results
  Running ads online will work for you, and it will get better the longer you do it.  Monitoring your results on a regular basis will help you decrease the cost as you will be able to determine the key areas that are working and you will be able to point your dollars to those areas.  There are tools provided by Google and Yahoo that help you track what your spending and also will show you what keywords and Geo areas are performing best for you.  If you have a service they also will have tools to show you this.  Keep an eye on your results to show that your money is well spent.  Now if you are noticing that your are getting a ton of traffic to your website and still no customers you will have another issue.  If you are targeting the correct customer to your site, your issue may be the content on your site.  Be sure that you are able to keep their attention on your site and that the information on your site is relevant to what they are there looking for.  Hopefully your service provider will be able to help you with this right away and guide you to getting the content on your site as customer friendly as possible.  It will also help determine your Per Click cost as the content on your site being relevant to your PPC ads will help determine your quality score which again gets factored into your cost per click and also your ad placement on Google.  Again, Customer service.  A click to your site is just that, a click.  Once they are on your site it is up to the content on the site to get that customer to decide to contact you or not.  

Factoring these options will help you in determining if it is cost effective for you to go with a specific company to manage your online advertising programs and help you determine which is best for you.

Here is a quick reference to how Google determines its quality score and so forth:

Here is a deeper look at quality score

 Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses, agencies