Before you buy any advertising space you should decide what it is you actually want from your ads. By having a clear focus on your goals from the outset you can maximise your results while minimizing wasted ad spend.
Online advertisers goals generally fall into one of the following categories:
- Selling products or services
- Gathering leads
- Driving visitors to your site
- Increasing brand awareness
We recommend that you decide from these four which category your ad should fall into. This is because each goal necessitates a different type of ad design and ad pricing model:
- If you want it to sell products then your ad should mention the products in your ad (and run CPA ads)
- If you want more leads you need to pique users interest enough to give you their details (and run CPL ads)
- If you want more visitors then you should tout the reasons why your site is good (and run CPC ads)
- If you just want Brand awareness you should make your ad highlight your logo, tagline and brand values (and run CPM ads).
You can, of course, try to accomplish more than one goal from this list with just one ad campaign if you like, but in our experience the more diluted the goal, the more diluted the results. If you have multiple goals, run multiple ad campaigns concurrently and split your budget based on priority.
Once you have your goals figured out, you then need to decide which metrics you should focus on to test whether you have achieved your goal.
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Next: Where to Advertise