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(This is a direct transcription please excuse any typing mistakes.)
When it comes to online paid advertising you will find a lot of jargon.
- Do you use a search network?
- Do you use a display network?
- Do you use banner ads?
What do you do? In the last podcast, we mentioned that we are going to create a number of podcasts with definitions so you are more informed about the various marketing strategies available and how they might fit for you.
We are going to explain for you what ‘search’ means and what ‘display advertising’ relates to when it comes to Google and therefore you will be in an informed position should you engage Google AdWords expert to develop a campaign for you.
Today we are going to cover a few more definitions for you and this time we’re going to think about the paid advertising arena, particularly when it comes to Google and Google paid advertising which I know a number of you use.
Search Advertising
The first thing to cover is classic search advertising often referred to as pay-per-click. Fundamentally, every time somebody clicks on your ad, you will pay a fee and that will be dependent on how competitive that might be in the sector that you are in. So for instance, the example that we’ve used today is ‘IT recruitment company’ just because we are currently working with an IT recruiter at the moment so I just thought I’d use that as an example.
Quite a competitive term. Obviously, it’s a very buoyant market and you’ll see on the image that we’ve posted that we’ve highlighted in red the areas that are the search adverts. If you have a look there’s one that’s called ‘bigchoicegroup.com’ on the left-hand side and there’s another one that says ‘cheap recruitment company’.
If one of your clients or candidates are searching, they will put in what they are looking for whether it is ‘engineering recruiters’ or ‘engineering recruitment companies’ or ‘medical recruitment companies’, whatever that might be, then they would type something and Google would think ‘Okay, these guys want to know XYZ let’s just display the advert and they do that and they do it in different ways.
The ones on the top left-hand corner generally have paid more money to get their ad to appear and those on the right-hand side have generally paid a little bit less. That’s the premise of search and we’d always say– we recommend a couple of people that we know well that do pay-per-click advertising, so if you want to know more about that, just email me and I will pass on their details.
The thing about this is you do need someone who knows what they are doing around search advertising. What they do is they create an advert, you then display that advert through Google and your candidate or client will click that advert and they go through to something known as the landing page and we’ve talked about landing pages before. That would be a page on your website. Obviously, there are certain pieces of software you can use.
I think we’ve talked about Leadpages before which is software that we use and recommend to clients. Your client or candidate lands on a page and that page has all the information that they need and then they can make a decision about whether they will contact you or not. It can be really useful because one of the great things about search, is you can find out what different keywords convert better for you.
It can be a little more expensive so imagine if you’ve got a number of keywords and you’re thinking “I wonder what people are finding us through?” Through the search network, you could potentially find what the main keywords are that your clients and candidates are searching for. That gives you a lot of information because you could then start to write more content around that.
It depends on your market. It can be expensive to advertise on the search networks. For instance, when I was doing some research for this podcast today, the cost per click for advertising and appearing on the first page of Google was £4.00 or £5.00 per click. If you imagine that your average conversion rate on search advertising like this is going to be anywhere between 1% and 2%, you can see that for every hundred clicks that you make, then that’s going to cost you significantly. Content marketing costs suddenly seem worth it when you look at this data.
Display Advertising
There’s another type of advertising that we are going to talk about today and that is called display advertising. You may see it on different websites and here’s an image that you can look at that explains display advertising and also something known as placement advertising which is really useful.
Display advertising is where you can get your advert, whether that be text or image, image adverts are good because they convert well, to display in different parts of the World Wide Web, particularly where your clients hang out.
The example I’ve used here, I’m showing you a couple of ways that display advertising works and this is a screen grab from recruiter.co.uk. As you can see, there’s an advert that has appeared which is known as a placement ad and this ad was actually GoToMeeting and as you can see what I’ve highlighted is a little blue arrow in the corner. This shows you that this is an advert that you can ask Google to place on particular websites.
So just imagine, these tend to be a lot less expensive. We are going to talk about re-targeting and re-marketing in another podcast, probably next week. But what I wanted to explain to you is, using the theme IT recruiters, imagine if you knew where some of your IT recruiters hang out. There might be specific websites that they go and visit. Maybe some specific forums where they get information and imagine if you could have your ad shown there.
Generally, these are a little bit less expensive because they are popping up in front of people and people can click on your ad. These can be really good because when you click on these ads, they will take you back to a landing page. Landing pages are just literally as their name suggests is where someone would land. These could be specifically created for your adverts so it could be “Great that you’ve arrived here. We’ve got XYZ that you might be interested in. To find out more click here.” And so it is very tailored to people. The thing about landing pages is you need to make them tailored to the advert that you’ve got.
What I’ve also done here is just explain a little bit of something else that I thought might be interesting for you is you can also on certain websites buy advertising. So on Recruiter, somebody like myself and Sharon, we could buy an advert on Recruiter. We want to attract more of you guys to come and work with us and that is either through training, you’ve gone to one of our training courses helping you on your marketing strategy or content marketing. Obviously, we want to get our adverts in front of you. So what are we going to do? We might decide to go along to Recruiter and say “Hey! Can we buy an advert with you?” And that is something again that you might want to consider because that is a really clever way of advertising.
Who knows? It depends on the different markets. But you might, for instance, be able to get an ad placed for £1,000 a year or something like that if that could create some leads for you that would be well worth it and again you’d have a specific landing page.
So I hope this has explained a little bit about search vs. display advertising. So what I want to do, the goal of recording this is so you go along and you are informed if you have any conversation with people about how much this might cost you, what’s the conversion rate, how might this help.
P.S. If you need any online marketing advice get in contact here; we can help.
This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+
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