- Web Marketing Is Your Online Presence
- Web Marketing Is Search Engine Marketing
- Web Marketing Is Online Advertising
- Web Marketing Is Email Marketing
- Web Marketing Is Blog Marketing
- Web Marketing Is Social Media Marketing
- Web Marketing Is Online Public Relations
- Web Marketing Is Multimedia Marketing
- Web Marketing Is Mobile Marketing
- The Bottom Line
Web Marketing Is Online Advertising
There's another way to get your name in front of web searchers, of course, and that's by purchasing ad space on those very same search results pages. For this reason, most marketers consider search engine advertising to be part of search engine marketing. It's certainly an important component of most web marketing plans.
To advertise with Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other major search engines, you typically create a pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement. A PPC ad is so-named because you pay only when the ad is clicked by a customer; you don't pay for the placement itself. It's true results-oriented advertising, unlike most traditional advertising in the offline world.
PPC advertising is also different in that you have to bid on those keywords that people are searching for. If you're a high bidder, your ad gets prominently displayed on the search results page for that particular keyword; if you're outbid, your ad gets displayed lower in the search results or not at all.
This sort of keyword bidding makes PPC advertising challenging for those used to traditional cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising. Not only do you have to write compelling ad copy (but not a lot of it—PPC text ads are typically very short), you also have to figure out the right keywords and how much to bid on each one. It's tricky, but it's the way the advertising game is played on the Web.
Or rather, that's the way some of the advertising game is played on the Web. More traditional display advertising also exists, typically in the form of graphical banner ads found on the top or the sides of pages on some websites. These ads are typically paid for on a CPM impressions basis, although some banner ads are also sold as part of a PPC program. In any instance, there's a lot of ad inventory available on the Web, so you'll definitely want to consider some form of online advertising as part of your web marketing plan.