Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

Internet advertising is proving to be one of the most effective and best returns on investment for advertisers – if you know what you are doing!

Internet advertising is easy to setup, maintain and measure it’s effectiveness. Every dollar is accounted for and every lead is followed.

You are able to setup test campaigns and measure every interaction very closely. You can setup micro campaigns that target very specific areas.

The advertising inventory is huge as well. If you have a large budget, you can easily spend that budget and reach everyone.

What is Australian businesses doing?
Australia is moving more of it’s advertising dollars from offline, traditional type of advertising to online advertising.

It is estimated that Australian businesses spent $512 million for the first 3 months in 2010. This is an increase of 17% on the same period last year.

Where is the advertising dollars going?
There are a number of different places where Australian businesses can advertise. The choice depends on the users they are trying to reach, in what part of the buying process and the user demographic.

Social media advertising
We recently saw the introduction of Facebook advertising which is going well. This allows you to select the exact user profile that your ads will be displayed to. There has never been a time where you could advertise only to 20 year old females in Sydney for example.

Search engine advertising
Advertising on Google is the largest area for online advertising in Australia. Google took 51.7% of the online advertising dollars totalling $264.75 million dollars.

I believe one of the reasons why Google keeps increasing is because of the low entry level and all the tools they give you. A small business operator can sign up to Google Adwords and start advertising their website in a very short period of time.

It is very easy to blow money with search engine advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing. By entering into bidding wars or having little knowledge of how it is done can really affect the performance and returns.

Online classifieds
Online classified advertising is increasing but it is harder for small businesses to break into this type of advertising. These are usually reserved for large budget advertising programs. Their setup is a longer process and not automated like Google Adwords.

Online video advertising
Online video advertising takes just $5.7 million.

Email marketing
Email marketing had $7.9 million spent. I think this figure would be harder to measure because a lot of it would be setup and maintained in-house. Once an email system is setup, there is very little cost in running the program.

I believe that email marketing is very important to the overal mix of online marketing.

Overall picture
Just like in the traditional advertising world, an effective mix of online advertising venues needs to be implemented and measured. Many businesses are unsure where they can advertise. Deciding on where to advertise online and how to start seems to be the biggest issues for online advertising.

Business operators need to know where they can advertise, how to setup effective campaigns and measure the results. Just like in the real world of traditional advertising.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.